


Welcome to Beacon Hills, Please Enjoy the Rest of Your Life

by Katsuko



Series: Welcome to Beacon Hills [1]
Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Timelines, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Friends to Lovers, Multi, Sheriff Stilinski Is Dean Winchester, Sheriff Stilinski Knows, Stilinski Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-03-21 18:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 28,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3702075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katsuko/pseuds/Katsuko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dean Winchester arrived in Beacon Hills, he was just planning to finish up one final job then slip into obscure retirement. He never counted on meeting one Claudia Stilinski, six months pregnant and as sassy as any angel he'd ever met.</p><p>Or, the Supernatural/Teen Wolf fic I didn't know I wanted to write.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Claudia

**Author's Note:**

> AKA "the Superwolf story I didn't know I wanted to write until last year's Camp NaNoWriMo, which I then sat on until _this_ year's Camp kicked off this month."
> 
> Yes, it's been done before, but I decided I wanted to do my version of the tale. Timeline is a bit nebulous, with nothing of _Teen Wolf_ having happened when the story kicks off but all of _Supernatural_ through Season Five happened. Then fuck everything after that, because I remain of the opinion that after the Apocalypse you get to attempt to retire, not do a cosmic reboot with role reversal.
> 
> ...yes, I'm still fucking bitter over Gabriel's exit in Season Five, how did you ever guess?
> 
>  
> 
> ~~I'mma fix that shit, though, just watch :D~~
> 
>  
> 
> Rough timeline notes: the events of SPN happened, they just took place in the years prior to 1995. I will be slowly working towards the beginning of TW, which was 2011. This is going to be long seeing as I managed a little over 9K words last time Camp rolled around, have added another 2K since the first of the month, Stiles has just exited the terrible twos, and I want to end somewhere mid-Season One.

He'd stayed with Lisa and Ben for about two months before he found himself out in the world again. Hunting again, like he had promised Sammy and himself that he _wouldn’t_ do, because there were still demons out there hiding from whoever was in charge of hell now that Lucy was in the cage. 

Dean knew that someone had to make sure they all got sent back to the pit where they belonged. And he realized that he was likely to at least be one of those somebodies, so off he went. 

Sometimes the hunts were quick and easy, over and done with only hours or days after he rolled up on a demon. Other hunts took upwards of a month or so to take care of the infestation, perform a not-so quick and dirty exorcism, and be on his way down the road again. But Dean was making progress, and by the time he'd been at it for over a year he was giving consideration to retiring permanently this time. 

After one last hunt. 

This last demon he was tracking had nestled itself into a small middle of nowhere NoCal town called Beacon Hills. It was mentioned briefly in Dad's journal, rumored to be home of an established werewolf pack and something called a Nemeton, but there were no indicators saying that either the wolves or the Nemeton whatsit were a problem; Dean planned to ignore them unless he was given a reason to do otherwise and just focus on Beelzebub's cousin or whoever this demon was claiming itself to be. 

Thus far the local news hadn't told him much besides the facts that Beacon Hills was boring as fuck: no mysterious occurrences in the past fifty years, no unexplained deaths, incredibly low suicide rate, and two malls that _both_ had a goddamn Macy's. 

When he finished this hunt, he was giving serious consideration to just... putting down roots and staying. Let Dean Winchester simply disappear into obscurity. 

So he was just sort of hanging around the local diner - which had some damned good pie, so that made the past week fairly worthwhile - listening to the gossip in order to hopefully find out something about his target. Hell, he didn't have a name or M.O. to attach to this particular bastard; the only reason he'd known where to go was all thanks to Bobby.

Anyway, he was enjoying some pie and gossip when she walked through the door. Well, more correctly she waddled through the door, one arm slung low around her stomach in that protective manner expectant mothers seemed to instinctively possess. She was sort of pretty, all strawberry blonde hair and big blue-grey eyes and fair freckled skin, but that wasn't what drew Dean's attention to her as she entered the building.

No, that would be the fact that she all but flung the door open and loudly announced, "Oh my God, someone get me a Coke and a large order of curly fries and keep those bastards coming. I'll be right back after I piss a river."

It was a solid testament to the Crazy Pregnant Lady being a local by the fact that the woman behind the counter - Nina? Gina? something like that anyway - responded with an eyeroll and an admonishment of, "For Christ's sake, Claudia, there are out of towners in here," even as she moved to dispense the requested drink.

"Welcome to Beacon Hills," the now-designated Claudia said to the room at large. "Feel free to drink the water, stay out of the woods after dark, and for fuck's sake avoid anyone who says he has a magical dick. Those assholes are trouble." With that, she waved over her shoulder and slipped into the ladies room.

Dean turned to the waitress who had returned to the table and asked, "Is that normal for people around here?"

Tracey the Waitress snorted and refilled Dean's coffee. "That's normal for Claudia," she replied. "She's her own special brand of crazy, but we love her anyway."

"Huh." Dean offered a grin to to his waitress as she headed across the room to check on another table before frowning to himself. He still had nowhere to really start in tracking down this demon, and he was dreading the thought of putting in a call for assistance. He really, _really_ didn't want to be called an idiot today.

While he was lost in his thoughts, the pregnant woman had finished up in the bathroom and made her way to sit at the counter, where she was chatting with Nina-or-Gina as she ate her curly fries. Dean snapped back to awareness of the room around him as she raised her voice.

"Seriously, Tina, there's something wrong."

Oh, _Tina._ He'd been about three-fourths correct on the woman's name.

"Claudia, be serious," Tina said, sounding exasperated. "You told me you didn't care if Thomas screwed around with other woman because, and I quote, _the sex wasn't that great anyway and he'd be a shit dad."_

"And I stand by that statement," Claudia replied in a tone that suggested she thought Tina was being difficult. "I'm just saying it's pretty goddamn ridiculous that the last three women he's fucked around with are all currently in the ICU at Beacon Hills Memorial in comas and no one thinks there's any kind of connection."

"Maybe it's some kind if bacterial thing," the other woman replied. "Like mono or meningitis or something."

Claudia scowled, and Dean could practically sense her frustration. "Please, tell me what type of bacterial infection causes someone's eyes to turn black," she challenged.

 _Bingo,_ the hunter thought to himself as he stood up, tossing a few bills on the table to pay for his pie as he made his way to the counter. He finally had a clue as to what, exactly, he was looking for, and it seemed like Miss Small Town USA might be a good place to learn more about the incubus' - and seriously? _Seriously?_ \- current host.

Tina was giving the strawberry blonde a look that said she was worried about the other woman's sanity. "So your conclusion is that Thomas is possessed by a demon?" she asked.

"No, I think he's possessed by the tooth fairy," Claudia snarked back before all but shouting, _“Of course_ he'd be possessed by a demon! I know goddamn well you've seen _The Exorcist_ fifteen times, what _else_ would possess a person?"

"Demons aren't real, Claudia," Tina said with a sigh. "If there really _is_ something wrong with Thomas, you should tell someone. Like the sheriff or someone at the hospital."

Claudia snorted, the sound in no way delicate. "Yeah, right," she scoffed. "If the sheriff's department hasn't cottoned on to the weird yet, they won't listen to _me._ Remember who called all last winter about the howling in the preserve?"

"Yes, but that's because you said it sounded like wolves," Tina replied as Dean leaned casually on the counter. "But there haven't been any wolves in California for ages."

The woman rolled her eyes. "I'm aware of that, thank you. Especially since _I’m_ the one who shared that little factoid with you."

"Excuse me, ladies," Dean cut in smoothly, offering a grin as the two turned to look at him. "I was wondering if one of you knew how I can get to the sheriff's office."

"I have the number if you needed to make a report?" Tina offered, sounding less like she was giving information and more like she was asking _him_ if that was okay.

Claudia, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes and gave him a suspicious look. "Why're you headed that way?" she asked; where Tina's had sounded curious, Claudia's was an accusation.

Dean offered up what he hoped was a bashful grin and shrugged. "Well," he said almost sheepishly, "I'm looking to stay in town for a while and was hoping that they might be looking for a new deputy or volunteer."

Tina smiled back at him, but Claudia's expression remained unchanged. "Oh, we don't get many newcomers who wanna stick around through here very often," the blonde said cheerfully. "Most people just pass through on their way north or south, don't they?" she added with a glance towards her friend.

Claudia finally offered a smile; Dean couldn't help but be reminded idly of Gabriel's smirk or a dog baring its fangs. "True that," she replied sweetly. "Actually, I'm headed back that way myself. The high school's just down the road from the station, and even if technically I'm on leave I need to check up on my kids. They've probably conned the sub into thinking the trig midterm is voluntary instead of a quarter of their grade."

"You really don't have to go to all that trouble, ma'am," he tried to defer, wondering just how quickly this was going to go south on him. "Just point me in the right direction."

"Nonsense," the woman protested, heaving herself off the stool and settling both hands over her stomach. "It's really not out of my way at all, and this one," here she hitched her thumb over her shoulder to indicate Tina, who just grinned more brightly, "is always telling me to stop scaring the norms. Dude, just accept the assist."

Dean bit back a sigh and nodded after a few seconds. As much as he was starting to regret the idea of trying to finesse some information out of the woman, she remained his only possible lead. "I think I'll take you up on that offer."

"Then let's go, handsome," she replied with a wink before turning back to her friend. "I'll call you later to bitch about the Hale kid. If my students _have_ conned the sub, that little shit was the mastermind."

"Peter Hale's a good kid," Tina responded, rolling her eyes once more.

Claudia didn't bother with a response, instead heading for the door and giving every indication that she wasn't planning to wait for Dean to join her. The hunter said a quick goodbye to the blonde at the counter before rushing after the other woman. Claudia hadn't gone very far, but she _had_ gravitated to the Impala unerringly and was now leaning on the door and giving him a searching look.

"Before I get in this beast with you," she said evenly, "I'm gonna need a name. Girl's gotta watch out for herself, you know."

"I understand," Dean replied, still maintaining what he hoped was a convincingly innocent grin. "Name's Darrell. Darrell Sweet."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Chrissie Hynde."

 _Well, fuck,_ he thought even as he said, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard two people call you Claudia back there."

"And I'm about a hundred percent positive that you aren't the drummer for Nazareth," she replied with a shrug. "So, let's try this one more time. What's your _real_ name, Darrell?"

Dean fixed the woman with a look for a moment, hoping that he was properly conveying just _how_ much he didn't want to be fully honest; Claudia returned it with a look saying quite clearly how many fucks she gave about what he wanted, which was precisely zero. If he didn't need to know as much as possible about the incubus' host, he would just tell her to forget about everything and put in a call to Bobby for an assist. But there was just something in him that was _tired_ of doing this on his own, a part of him that was more than ready for retirement.

"Dean," he finally conceded, shoulders slumping. "Dean Winchester."

Claudia folded her arms across her chest. "I thought we were going for honest here, pal," she said. "I don't know what the hell you think you're trying to pull, but I grew up in this town and I don't appreciate some Joe Shmoe from the big city coming through here making fun of me."

Dean pulled out his wallet, removed his driver's license - the one he got before hitting the road the first time with Sam what felt like forever ago, back home in Lawrence - and held it out to the woman. "Go on, take it," he said when she just looked at the card in his hand. It was another ten or fifteen seconds before she huffed out a breath and snatched it from him.

"If this is a fake," Claudia said after examining the card for roughly thirty seconds, "it's a damned good one. What's in Lawrence, Kansas that would make a guy like you with all that," she waved the hand still holding his license as if indicating his entire person, "going on for him take off for Beacon Hills, California?"

"Bad memories," was all Dean offered, not willing to say any more than that. Apparently Claudia was satisfied with that answer because she only nodded and handed the card back to him.

"Claudia Zdzislawa Stilinski," she said. At Dean's incredulous look she just grinned that same Gabriel-wolfish smile. "It's a family name, my folks are incredibly Polish."

"As in first or second generation American Polish or just off the boat Polish?" he found himself asking, then wanting to kick himself for it.

Thank God she just laughed. "As in my _pradziadek_ insisted that his kids learned Polish and English growing up and the tradition has continued through my grandparents and my own parents. I haven't decided yet if I'm gonna do that with Przemyslaw or not."

"I hope you're not really naming the kid that."

"Hey, jackass," the woman replied smacking him on the chest with the back of her hand, "that's my father's name."

"Sorry," Dean said, holding up his hands. "It's your kid and your choice. But I really do need your help," he added, trying to get himself back to the issue at hand.

"How can an unwed momma-to-be possibly help you out?" she asked, quirking one eyebrow at him even as she relaxed against the Impala's door.

"Because you're the only person who I can trust to be honest with me. Because I believe you when you say your baby daddy is acting like he's possessed." Dean paused and looked directly at Claudia, meeting her very pretty eyes steadily. "Because it's been my job for the past few years to hunt down demons and send them back to hell where they belong, and I intend to do so here in your little town."

Claudia peered back at him, silent for so long that he expected her to start laughing in his face and insisting that he just drop her off at the high school before putting this whole meeting behind her. When she finally spoke, Dean almost felt the stress drain away:

"Okay then. How do we start?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note the First: For some reason, my Claudia is either Sophie Turner or Emma Stone at this point. I don't even know.
> 
> Note the Second: Stiles takes after his momma, if you couldn't tell from this part ^_~


	2. Bad News Coming Down the Line

The three months that followed the successful - still fairly tragic, given the circumstances - exorcism of the incubus that had been feeding off the ladies of Beacon Hills had been quiet in regards to hunting but never boring. That was mainly due to the fact that Dean had made a deathbed promise to Thomas, the poor sap who'd been the demon's host, to keep an eye on Claudia...

And Claudia Stilinski was a force of nature.

The fact that she had been just shy of six months pregnant when Dean rolled into town hadn't stopped her from doing everything she could to help him exorcise the demon; point of fact, she had actually gone so far as to fake a possible miscarriage in order to get the two of them into the hospital long enough for the now-former hunter to take a look at the admission records for the comatose victims. When it was made clear that Thomas wasn't going to make it through, the woman had been obviously upset - she later told Dean that the man would have been a shit dad but she had intended to keep him as part of Przemyslaw's life - but still insisted on helping her new acquaintance.

In the aftermath, Dean found a small apartment to rent on a monthly basis and moved out of the motel room he'd been operating out of. It wasn't ideal, but it was located in what passed for downtown, not too far from the sheriff's office where he started working on a voluntary basis. The deputies and the sheriff himself dipped into their own pay to make sure Dean was taken care of, none of them much worried over the fact that he didn't have any real work history; as a matter of fact, Sheriff Woodruff had been making noise about paying for Dean to go through academy training and hiring him on officially.

Claudia teased him about it, calling him the official BHSD mascot. Even as she did, however, she would pull him down next to her on the sofa in her own living room or in Dean's apartment and curl into his side. The woman was tactile and mouthy, and he was pretty goddamned positive that she had managed to become his best friend in just a few short months. He had just been starting to think seriously about just moving in with her to better help out with the kid - who he was _seriously_ giving a nickname the minute he was out of the womb and Dean could move far away enough from Claudia to avoid her smacking the crap outta him for it - when The Call came in.

Dean had been elbow-deep in soapy water, washing up the dishes from the meal Claudia had made for them at her house when he heard Bobby's ringtone come from his cell. He groaned to himself and looked over his shoulder to where his best girl was sitting on a bar stool.

"Hey, can you grab that for me, Clauds?"

The woman snorted at the nickname but still reached over to pick up the phone. "Dean's phone," she said as she answered, "she who rules his world speaking. How you doing, Bobby?" She paused to let the man answer, her brows knitting and a small frown flitting across her lips before saying, "Okay, I'll get him right away."

"What's wrong?" Dean asked, moving away from the sink and drying his hands on his jeans before reaching to take the phone.

"I don't know," Claudia replied, "but apparently you are _the goddamnedest idjit_ he's ever met, if that helps any."

"Fuck me," he muttered under his breath. Into the phone he said, "Hey, Bobby. Bad news coming down the line?"

_"You could say that,_ Bobby replied, voice gruff as usual but holding a hint of worry. That right there was exactly why Dean had always - to himself, anyway - thought of the man as a favorite uncle. _"What the hell you been doing out there in California?"_

"Uh," Dean said, looking towards Claudia who was leaning on the counter and giving him a worried look; this prompted him to put the phone on speaker before continuing, "nothing since the exorcism a few months ago. I'm retired now, Bobby. For real this time."

_"Well, shit, kid,"_ Bobby said, _"then whatever it was you did before that caught someone's attention. There's been a hit on your FBI file out in Colorado. Someone is definitely looking for Dean Winchester, and you've been stationary for long enough that they might just find you."_

"I can't go anywhere right now," Dean growled. "I made a promise that I wasn't gonna run off, and I'm not breaking it."

_"Then you need to get an air-tight, shiny new identity pretty goddamned fast, you idjit. I ain't about to bury another one of your daddy's boys, either figuratively or literally."_

Claudia's lips twisted into a frown, one hand absently rubbing over her baby bump. "This is the FBI file saying that you and Sammy are dangerous serial killers, yeah?" she asked. "The one that was supposedly cleared but was instead just buried?" At Dean's nod and Bobby's affirmative grunt, she continued, "Then that means that whoever it is trying to track you down is looking for a single guy."

"I hate to break it to you, Clauds," Dean replied dryly, "but technically I'm _still_ a single guy."

"Not if we go into town right now and get hitched at the courthouse."

Clearly he was hearing things. "You wanna run that by me again. Slower and in English, preferably."

Claudia shot him an unamused look. "I mean it, Dean Winchester," she said firmly. "You don't feel like running at all, and I don't feel like seeing my best friend get yanked out of town like you aren't secretly a superhero. If you're a married man with a kid on the way, chances are good that anyone who thinks you're you will decide that you _aren't_ you. Or... something," she shrugged. "That actually made sense in my head."

_"Actually, she's got a point,"_ Bobby said after a moment, sounding thoughtful. _"Everyone knows that Dean Winchester is a bachelor who has no intentions of settling down."_

Dean snorted. "That ship sailed pretty much a week after I got here, Bobby," he said. And it was the truth: he was more than happy to call Beacon Hills home now, and he didn't want to be forced to leave any more than Claudia wanted to see him go.

_"And so this idjit looking for you won't even take a second look at a family man,"_ the older man concluded. _"It's crazy, but it just might work."_

"I still have a few favors to cash in," Dean said carefully. "And I can probably cash in what favors Dad still has out there. I want this done right so that the people I care about," he glanced at Claudia, eyes drifting down to the bump where the littlest Stilinski was still hanging out, "whether they're here yet or not, will be safe."

"I'm taking that to mean that there's still going to be a shiny new identity prior to getting hitched, huh?" the woman asked, absently rubbing a hand over her stomach. She was _very_ pregnant, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-eight weeks, and had been grumbling for a couple weeks now that Przemyslaw was _taking his sweet ass time moving out of his current digs._

And yet at the moment, she wasn't in the least bit worried about how close to delivering she was; Claudia's concerns lay fully in making sure that _Dean_ would be okay. The woman was something else, all right, and the former hunter was glad she was on his side.

_"Shouldn't take too much work,"_ Bobby said, drawing Dean out of his thoughts of the moment. _"There's one ID that was never shuffled your way, mostly because Ash was a smartass as well as being an idjit at times, but it's just a slightly different last name. I'll call in some of my own favors, too, get it handled faster. I'll send you everything express courier once it's set."_

Dean frowned slightly. "Won't it be weird for us to suddenly be married when we haven't left town pretty much since I got here yet neither of us has wandered to the court house?" he asked.

Claudia was nodding her agreement. "I'll admit I _really_ don't wanna be taking a major road trip right now," she said, "but I think we could probably make a weekend trip to Vegas and meet someone to get _all_ the paperwork there and just tell folks here that we decided to do it on the spur of the moment."

"Hell," Dean added wryly, "half this town thinks we've been a couple since the day we met. They're more likely to ask why we didn't have a real wedding than wonder why we decided to get married so soon after getting together."

On the other end of the line, Bobby snorted. _"Sounds like y'all mostly worked this out on your own,"_ he said. _"I'll start cashing in those favors and give you a call as soon as things are set. You two just be ready to take that spur of the moment trip the second you hear from me."_

"Thanks, Bobby," Dean replied. "We owe you one."

_"Course you do,"_ Bobby groused, but he could tell that it was good-natured. _"Just keep an ear out for my call, and be aware that the local furball population might take offense to your impending permanent residence."_

"Will do. Thanks again," Dean said, adding a quick goodbye before hanging up the phone. He immediately added to his now-fiancee, "No, that does _not_ mean I'm gonna shoot the Hale punk for you."

Claudia let out a heavy sigh. "Oh, come on," she whined. "What fun is it in marrying a dude who's practically licensed to shoot werewolves if you won't shoot one for me?"

He gave her a Look; one could say it had a Tone. "Because being a stupid teenager isn't a killable offense," he retorted. "If it was, I never would have made it past fifteen."

The woman snorted. "I probably would have got as far as fourteen before someone shivved me," she replied. "Okay, so no shooting Peter. For now."

"Claudia..."

Claudia held up her hand defensively. "Kidding," she said. Dean thought that she was still pretty serious about the very real desire to see someone put a bullet in the kid's ass, but for now she was at least willing to back down; there was no doubt in his mind that this argument would be revisited sooner rather than later.

"Anyway," she added after a moment, "when do you think we should drop vague hints to our neighbors and friends about the possibility of getting hitched?"

Dean shrugged. "Any time now, I guess," he said. "Seriously, I think the only reason Sheriff Woodruff hasn't already shuffled me off to the academy is because he's waiting for me to ask about what benefits I could get for a wife and kid."

Claudia snickered. "I wanna be there when you tell him that the paperwork needs to be processed under my name."

"Oh?" the ex-hunter quirked an eyebrow at the woman. "And why is that?"

"Because, oh dear husband-to-be of mine," Claudia pointed out matter of factly, "anyone looking to track down Dean Winchester wouldn't take a second look if they turned up the name Dean Stilinski."

Dean made a face. "Deputy Stilinski sounds... weird," he offered after a moment.

Claudia's little grin went mischievous, and he wondered not for the first time if there might be a little trickster buried somewhere in her family line. "Just think of if you ever get it in your head to run for sheriff."

"Sheriff Stilinski sounds _even weirder,"_ he groaned. Claudia only cackled at his reaction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help myself >:D


	3. Alpha Hale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The local alpha finally appears. Dean is not impressed.

He was officially Dean Remington for the amount of time it took for his name change documentation to process. The only additional information that they had needed at the county clerk's office was a copy of the very official-looking marriage certificate, signed by both Dean and Claudia using her full name and his new identity. Given how small the town of Beacon Hills was, that took just a little under a week.

Which turned out to be just in time, because only a day after Dean received the phone call saying that he could come in to pick up his paperwork so he could start changing his name on other official documents Claudia went into labor. _That_ was twelve hours of hell on earth, which he could say honestly given his experience with all things demonic. Eventually, though, Przemyslaw Jonathan Stilinski decided to take pity on his mother and join the rest of the world.

("Why Jonathan?" he asked after the nurse on duty had left, taking with her their son's birth certificate. And the kid was indeed _their_ son, if only for the fact that Claudia hadn't even stuttered when giving Dean's name as the boy's father in spite of the fact that the whole town knew exactly who the bio-dad had been.

Claudia shrugged even as she carefully readjusted her hold on the baby. "I don't know," she said, a little bit too casually. "I just thought it would be nice for our son to share both our father's names."

And that, as they say, was that.)

Dean still hadn't come up with a good nickname for the kid, although for now Johnny was doable. He didn't know for sure if he could ever get used to calling his son _John,_ but if that was what the boy eventually settled on then he would soldier through. Besides, there were still many long months ahead before Johnny would even start to think about imitating the voices around him. For today, it was just the two of them, Claudia having booted husband and child out of the house so that she could attempt to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

Initially, his wife had insisted that she was going to breastfeed the baby for at least a month, more likely two. Dean had the feeling that the past week and a half had changed her views on _that_ idea considering the fact Johnny was on a vastly different sleeping and eating schedule than his parents. He was positive that Claudia was already fed up with waking up every two hours a night, and that when he returned home with the baby there would be a minimum of six cans of baby formula and/or a breast pump sitting on the kitchen counter in a blatant statement that _somebody_ was going to start taking half those late-night feedings.

Dean snorted in amusement at the thought and bounced Johnny as the baby started fussing at the sound. He was currently standing in Rockabye Baby, a little local baby boutique, examining the car seats and trying to decide which one would both keep his kid as safe as possible on the road and be easily switched between their two cars - he had no plans to get rid of the Impala, after all, and Claudia likewise had an unhealthy obsession with Roscoe, her CJ-5 - when he felt like he was being watched. Taking care to leave the motions casual, Dean turned slightly so that he could see behind him in the reflection of the glass display case just beyond the car seats.

There was a dark-haired woman standing at the end of the aisle. To all appearances, she was examining the novelty bibs on the endcap display, even going so far as to rifle through them as if looking for something specific. However, Dean could see in the glass that her eyes were trained on him with the attention of a predator; then she blinked and her eyes reflected red for a fraction of a second.

_Son of a bitch,_ he mentally sighed. In all honesty, he'd been hoping to fly under the radar for a little bit longer, like until Johnny started school and quite possibly wound up sharing a bus ride with one of the local pack's wolfy children. Instead, the head bitch in charge was standing in a baby store passive-aggressively stalking him.

Seriously, his goddamned _life._

Still, the fact remained that no one had ever accused Dean of having a well-developed sense of self-preservation. That was likely the reason why he shifted his kid to his opposite hip - because Claudia would kill him creatively if he let Johnny get so much as a scratch under his watch - even as he turned to the leader of the Hale pack and offered up what he hoped was a disarming smile.

"Hey," he greeted casually, swaying from side to side as his son started fussing slightly again.

The woman blinked at him, obviously stunned that the hunter she _thought_ she had been covertly watching was acknowledging her, before returning his grin with one of her own. "Hello," she said. "Mr. Winchester, was it?" she added with forced casualness.

"Stilinski now," he corrected with a shrug. "Although it was Remington before that. Dean's fine, though." He even had the forged birth certificate in the fireproof document safe at home, all the details fudged just enough that only those looking _very_ closely would be able to make vague connections to the man on the FBI's most wanted list. Ash had even left his parents' names intact, only going so far as to flip first and middle names.

"Of course," the werewolf replied, her stance not relaxing in the slightest as she stared him down. "I've been meaning to introduce myself, especially since you've been in town for some time now, but hadn't really had the opportunity."

Dean glanced around to see that no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to them before letting his grin turn a little wry. "Or you were just hoping the hunter would finish up what he was doing and fuck off out of your town. I get it," he added as the woman tensed further, "I really do. And I had, and have, no intention of doing anything about your pack beyond bumping into one of you in public or listening to my wife bitch about the seventeen year old who she _swears_ is trying to stage an uprising against the faculty."

The woman laughed, the sound easy as she finally relaxed. "My little brother is harmless," she said, tucking her hair behind one ear and giving him a real smile. "Even so, I still left my thirteen year old in charge of her younger siblings instead of Peter when I caught your scent." She held out a hand to him, and he shook it; the wolf had a good grip. "Talia Hale, alpha of the Beacon Hills pack."

"Alpha?" Dean asked. At the woman's questioning look he explained, "My family's specialty ran more along the lines of demons and possession, although we did run into other things from time to time. Dad's journal mentioned a pack, but until now I've only run into lone wolves."

"Omegas," Talia remarked, giving a slight nod. "Probably all of them feral, I don't doubt."

He huffed and rolled his eyes before glancing back down at his son. Claudia was probably sleeping right now, and he was hesitant to go home and possibly wake her up. It was obvious to him that he had no idea what the hell he was looking for where safety gear was concerned, and the alpha - he was _so_ calling Bobby to let him know their information on werewolves was in dire need of updating this evening - was by her own admission a mother at least three times over as well as apparently acting as guardian to her younger brother.

Dean looked back up at Talia and grinned broadly. "I would _love_ to hear all about pack dynamics," he said, "but I do need to get some things for the small fry here. Do you mind if we shop while we talk?"

The wolf gave him a Look that said she wasn't totally oblivious to his ulterior motives. "So long as you listen to my advice on what you should be looking for," she said, _"and_ you don't share anything I tell you in regards to my family with other hunters, I would be amenable to the idea."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I think that's all I'm going to post for the day. I still have another scene that was completed during last year's Camp NaNo, but I want to save that for the moment since I've written exactly two additional scenes for this round. I'd like to try posting in groups of threes, or at least have a couple upcoming chapters ready in the wings.
> 
> To be honest, I decided to post in order to keep myself motivated even after Camp ends. If it's out on the web, I don't have much of a reason to _not_ work on it, right?


	4. Tricky Moves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...okay, I lied. _This_ is the last update for today, and just because I want to get a certain someone back into play.

In the month and a half since his talk with Talia Hale, Dean found himself all but running into wolves _everywhere:_

At the grocery store, he could get everything on Claudia's list - including the baby formula, because he had called that one - without incident maybe one in five times. The other four trips he would bump into either Talia, who would be shopping herself and ask after his family, or Peter Hale, who was just as much of a little shit as his wife made the kid out to be. For seventeen, he was the most smug motherfucker Dean had ever had the displeasure of meeting, and he was counting angels in that number.

Well... okay, Peter wasn't _quite_ as bad as Zachariah, but it was pretty goddamned close.

At the post office, it would be the same story. Same with the gas station, although there he usually had the added pleasure of Laura Hale staring at him from the window of her mother's minivan while her nine year old brother pretended to be disinterested in the backseat. Dean knew faking disinterest from years of doing it from the backseat of the Impala while Dad was working, and he could definitely catch the unsubtle head turns that Derek kept utilizing.

The only Hale who _didn't_ give a shit was Cora... who was a whopping five months older than Johnny and was likely more interested in chewing on her own toes than in the stranger her family was borderline obsessed with. There didn't seem to be a husband/father in the picture, but Dean wasn't curious enough to ask after the man. If he was still around then he was apparently the parent who stayed at home or was entirely out of the picture as anything more than a sperm donor; if he was deceased, whatever happened must have taken place sometime during Talia's pregnancy with her youngest.

But today was a home with the family day, after a long week of training to join the Beacon Hills Sheriff Department as a full-time, official deputy, and Dean planned to focus on his wife and kid for at least the next ten hours.

As tended to happen when they were in one place for more than ten minutes and conscious, with Johnny entertained by the mobile hanging above the bassinet in the living room, the conversation turned to Dean's life before Beacon Hills. They had had more than a couple discussions about the creatures that he had tracked down over the years, including what were apparently feral omegas - and yes, it had _not_ been pleasant to talk about Madison with the local alpha, especially after finding out that most packs were willing to take in omegas who were legitimate about learning to control their wolfy nature - and he had mentioned the various demons and angels he'd crossed paths with. But although he'd talked (read: bitched) about Cas more than once, he had kept the topic steered away from the only other angel he and Sammy had butted heads with more than once.

Today, however, he had started talking about the Trickster that he and Sammy and Bobby had gotten tangled up with, only to interrupt himself with, "But he wasn't really dead, because we found out later that the bastard was a friggin' archangel."

Claudia's eyebrows made a valiant effort to migrate into her hairline. "Whoa, what?" she asked. "You're telling me that one of those angels you're always bitching about went around playing at being _another_ supernatural creature?"

"Oh yeah," Dean replied with a wry grin. "And not only that, he was one of the big four that get all the press from the Bible. Though I'm pretty sure that most people think of Gabriel as being a tall built Adonis or something instead of a short average-looking dude with a hell of a sweet tooth."

"Tell me about him," Claudia said, settling back onto the couch and taking a sip of her Dr. Pepper. When Dean hesitated for a moment she pleaded, "Come on, Dean, please? At least tell me why you haven't mentioned him at all til now."

"Lucifer killed him," he replied shortly, peeling the label off his beer bottle. "He died trying to stop the Apocalypse, and his goodbye was left in a porno."

His wife stared at him silently for a few very long minutes. "Then tell me the good stories," she finally said, "and we'll skim over the not-so-good for a later conversation."

And so Dean talked.

He told her about the Mystery Spot, where Sammy had informed him that the elder Winchester brother had died over three hundred times in as many different ways; what Dean remembered of it, in all honesty, was that the Tuesday breakfast special in that diner was Pig 'n a Poke (and yep, Claudia had both thought that was _hilarious_ and that she wanted to take a road trip back that way as soon as Johnny was old enough to appreciate it). He told her of his adventures in TV Land, when they found out that the Trickster was really an archangel and didn't give a damn about the impending destruction of all human life, and that he really just wanted the fighting to _stop._ He told her about all the times that Gabriel had left hints and clues for them, of warnings when things might possibly get a little hairy.

Dean didn't say much about the last few days he'd known Gabriel, only that they'd attended a meeting of the old gods and that the archangel had legitimately spent a few centuries as the Norse god Loki.

"Sounds like you guys were pretty tight," Claudia said, absently reaching over to check on Johnny; their kid was still very much entertained by the mobile hanging over him, and Dean grinned slightly at the thought that it was _incredibly_ easy to position a devil's trap where babies were concerned. At some point, he would have to push for Johnny to get an anti-possession rune tattooed on him somewhere.

His grin slipped away at his wife's next words: "So... do you still have that porno?"

It took him a moment to answer, and he was sure his expression had to be just as incredulous as his voice. "We are not watching a porno with our kid in the room, Clauds."

"Why the fuck not?" Claudia asked, rolling her eyes when Dean's automatically cut to Johnny. "Oh, _please,_ he's too young to understand what we're saying."

"Yeah," he scoffed, "and I'm holding you to that when his first words are _motherfucker, shitkicker,_ and _asshat."_

The woman cackled, which caused their son to start laughing as well. "Oh my God, I hope that I have a video camera on hand when it happens _and_ that it's in front of those busybodies at the art store!"

Dean shook his head in bemusement. "Even so, we're still not watching _that_ video with our two month old in the room."

So, of course, it was no more than ten minutes after that pronouncement that he found himself sitting on the couch watching _Casa Erotica 13_ with his wife right next to him feeding their kid his late afternoon bottle. Damn Claudia and her pout of doom (patent pending).

"Of course the chick's a blonde," Claudia noted immediately with a roll of her eyes. "It's always blondes. Why can't there be a brunette for a change?"

"If I manage to get to wherever trickster archangels go when they get ganked, I'll be sure to ask him for you," Dean replied dryly. He was honestly half-waiting to see if the dialogue automatically updated to include his wife or if it would play out exactly as it had when he watched it with Sammy.

He grinned slightly when his girl cackled madly when Gabriel entered the scene, and chuckled himself when she took a second to wheeze out _oh my God, the pornstache_ before calming herself enough to placate their now-fussing kid. It was still a bit surreal, even after all this time, to watch the video message left behind by the archangel before he'd gone to his demise, but Claudia's presence made it a little more tolerable.

The laughter fell away when Gabriel addressed the camera, and Dean held his breath for a moment: _"Sam. Dean. If you're watching this, I'm dead."_

The entire speech played out, Dean hearing it for the second time in his life and Claudia for the first. The woman's expression bordered between serious and sad, and he wondered if his wife would have gotten along well with the one-time Trickster. Even the bit at the end - _"This is me, standing up. And this is me, lying down."_ \- got the barest hint of a snort from his girl as she rubbed at one eye that he was _pretty_ sure had teared up a bit.

"Okay," Claudia said as the action resumed on the screen, which he hadn't seen previously as Sammy had slammed the laptop shut with extreme prejudice when things got heated, "first, you didn't mention that he was freaking adorable. I mean, maybe it's my mothering instincts going haywire, but I kind of just want to wrap him up in a blanket and feed him tomato soup. Like, the real homemade shit, not Campbell's. Second, holy _shit,_ this is some of the worst porn dialogue I've ever heard in my life," she added, waving a hand at the television as she passed Johnny to Dean to hold for a while. "And I've watched a lot of porn."

Dean snickered. "I know, you showed me your collection when I moved in," he pointed out, settling his kid on his shoulder and rubbing his little back. Damn, but he adored the hell out of the woman he married. If he'd met her a few years earlier, before he slipped so deeply into the hunter lifestyle that he was now happily leaving behind him, he would likely have fallen for her spunkiness and her no-fucks-to-give attitude. Chances were good that he could still fall for her, but he wasn't going to screw up their dynamic by being the dude who read too much into a friendship.

Ignore the fact that they were officially married; she was his best friend in the whole goddamn world, and he would sooner die than to lose that.

The video ended shortly after that, both Claudia and Dean making faces at some of the sounds the 'actors' were making ("Why is he _barking?!"_ she muttered at one point as she flipped the remote in her hands; he answered with a shrug and "The same reason she mooed, I would guess.") and returned to the home menu. Dean frowned slightly as he noted an option that hadn't been there when they put the disk in to play. 

Claudia spotted it a half-second after he did. "Bonus scenes?" she asked aloud, tilting her head to one side and blinking. "Since when does _porn_ have extended cuts?"

"The weird part is that wasn't there when we started the disk," Dean pointed out quietly, rubbing Johnny's back as the boy dozed on his shoulder. "Something's fishy, Clauds."

"I'm playing them," the woman said decisively. She wasted no time in following through, selecting the menu option and leaning forward slightly, the remote dangling from her hands between her knees. For his part, Dean settled back more on the couch and wondered briefly if he should have put their kid back in his bassinet before Claudia hit _play_ again.

The scene opened up in a room nearly identical to the one in the *ahem* feature presentation, only this time the female star was a redhead with cats-eye glasses. There was intro dialogue that vaguely mirrored that of _Casa Erotica 13,_ leading Dean to wonder absently if all the features in this particular series started off the same. At the knock on the door, Red set aside the laptop she was typing away on to answer. To absolutely no surprise, Gabriel was on the other side.

"I still can't get over that fucking pornstache," Claudia muttered, earning a snort of amusement from her husband. The woman flashed him a grin before both let their attention drift back over to the screen.

...where Gabriel seemed to be looking directly back at them. Which wasn't the least bit creepy as fuck, _no._

_"Hello, there. Remember me, kids?"_ Then he narrowed his eyes for a moment before adding, _"Wait, that's not Sam."_

Claudia sat up abruptly and turned to look at Dean, eyes wide and saying wordlessly _what the fuck, dude?_ Dean answered with a silent raise of his eyebrows _how the hell should I know?_ No sooner than the silent exchange was finished than they heard a snap from the television and a voice spoke up from right behind the goddamn couch:

"Yeah, that's definitely not Sam unless there's something you need to tell me."

_"Jesus fucking monkey trikes!"_

Claudia's shriek was accompanied by Dean's own startled shout, Johnny abruptly bursting into tears at the noise, and the remote being flung hard enough to bounce off the archangel's forehead with a resounding thunk.

She immediately whipped back around to face her husband and squeaked, "You said he died!"

"I thought he had!" came the reply, knowing that his girl wasn't angry at him; this was the loudness meaning _I am startled and confused by something and will stop shouting once I am done being startled even if I am still confused_. The _I am pissed off and you had better lock yourself in your room if you don't want me to kill you in your sleep_ was about three octaves lower, and he was a wise enough man to heed that loudness quickly.

Dean then turned to shoot a glare at Gabriel, standing up from the couch so he could walk around and hopefully get his kid to stop wailing. "How the hell are you not dead?" he asked, his expression in strong contrast with the low, soothing tone he was using. As much as he would dearly love to keep shouting at the trickster angel, that wouldn't do anything to calm down the unhappy little boy he was holding.

Gabriel frowned back, one hand rubbing the spot where he'd been whacked with the remote while holding said object in the other. "First off, _ow._ Sweetheart, you've got an arm on you. Second, _I_ thought I was done for when Lucifer shanked me, so don't go getting bitchy. Third," he trailed off for a moment, eyes going to the baby that was slowly calming down. "Third, how the hell long have I been gone? Surely not long enough for you to have a kid, right?"

"Damned near, though," Dean replied. "It took about a month to put Lucy back in the cage." He paused briefly, a frown crossing his face at the memory of completing the task and still losing Sammy.

"Then you stayed with Lisa and Ben for a couple months before getting back on the road," Claudia helpfully noted. "Then another, what, twelve months before you hit Beacon Hills?"

The former hunter nodded, adding, "Then the past five months living here, both in the hotel and here with you and the rugrat, totals up to just under two years that you've been out of the world."

The archangel blinked slowly, looking back and forth between Dean and Claudia with a couple glances tossed Johnny's way as he gradually cried himself out and dropped back to sleep. After a very long, incredibly not-comfortable silence, he spoke.

"Yeah. Seems like I missed a hell of a lot because of that, too." Gabriel fiddled with the remote for a moment before tossing it back towards the couch and followed it, dropping next to Claudia and turning to grin at her. The strawberry blonde responded with a quirked eyebrow and an utterly unimpressed Look.

Dean barely bit back the snort he _so badly_ wanted to let out, instead focusing most of his attention on his kid. The little boy was still making slightly unhappy sounds in his sleep, and he responded by making soothing sounds low in his throat and rubbing Johnny's back to keep him calm.

He really didn't know if he was good at this whole fatherhood thing or not, given that as much as he (still) hero worshiped the man, John Winchester would never be mistaken as a Father of the Year candidate. Hell, Dean and Sammy had grown up in motel rooms and the back on the Impala; that wasn't the best example to use when trying to do right by Claudia's and his son. So, quite frankly, Dean was making up this shit as he went along and hoping he didn't fuck up the kid too badly in the end.

It probably took a few minutes longer than necessary for him to notice that his wife and the archangel's silent conversation had ended, and that was only because he looked towards them when he turned to make another slow circuit of the room with the baby. Dean all but froze in his tracks at the looks he was receiving: Claudia's pretty blue-grey eyes were soft and affectionate, a small smile on her lips as she watched him with their son, whereas Gabriel likewise had a small smile but his was an odd mixture of amusement and happiness for another living being.

"What?" he asked, crossing the room to settle Johnny into the bassinet. At the child's whine he kept one hand resting on his son's back while shooting his companions a questioning glare. Claudia just shook her head, expression still fond; the archangel looked back and forth between the two of them before heaving a far too dramatic sigh and shaking his head.

"Oh dear God, you deserve one another," Gabriel said, rolling his eyes as both the humans in the room turned confused eyes his way. "I'm just here to observe, guys. I'm gonna have fun watching the two of you figure this out on your own."

And with that, the archangel turned Trickster turned archangel again snapped his fingers and vanished.

"What the hell was he talking about?" Claudia asked, looking back at Dean. "Figure _what_ out?"

The ex-hunter shrugged. "Hell if I know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel is an asshole, and I love him ♥


	5. Something Lost, Something Found

Years later, when his kid would ask him how it happened, Dean would keep the fact that if not for The Incident - and yes, that fucking called for caps - it was highly likely that Johnny would have been at _least_ five before he and Claudia figured their shit out.

It started with a call to the station at just past eight in the morning. Dean had already been on for ten hours at that point, pulling a 10 to 10 before having the next three days off to spend with his wife-slash-BFF and kid, so answering the phone to a vaguely frazzled Talia Hale was _not_ the high point of his day.

He knew that he was probably about to pull another ten or so hours when not five minutes after advising the alpha to come in and file a missing persons report, Devon Krasikeva (and seriously, what the fuck was up with the disproportionate Polish population in this goddamn little town?) called to say his daughter Paige was missing.

Just like Peter Hale was now nearly thirty-eight hours past his curfew.

And, of course, the couple had been last seen leaving the girl’s house en route to a concert at a club in the next town over on Friday night.

Both Talia and Devon had the same story: Peter had left his house at 6:30, having come home to shower and change after basketball practice. He had picked Paige up close to 7, both teenagers reassuring her parents that they were only staying in Carterston long enough for the concert and would likely be back in Beacon Hills by midnight. Paige had mentioned that if it looked like they would be returning any later than that she would just stay overnight at the Hales and be home in the early afternoon.

The Krasikevas had gone to bed sometime around 1 o’clock Saturday morning, assuming that the kids were running late and heading for the Hale place. Talia had been up until 4 in the morning, Cora having been dealing with a bout of colic and fussiness - she told Dean off the record that the baby was old enough to start feeling her wolf beneath her skin and had been half-shifted most of that night - and she had thought that her brother opted to spend the night on his girlfriend’s couch rather than wake the household coming in so late. No one in either family realized that neither Peter nor Paige was back until late Saturday afternoon, close to 5:30; that was when Angela Krasikeva had called to see when her daughter was planning to head home.

Upon realizing that both teens were missing, Talia had driven herself and her kids to the Krasikeva house and left Laura in charge of not only her siblings but Paige’s younger brother as well so that the three adults could start searching. Since it hadn’t been twenty-four hours at that point, all of them were hoping that maybe Peter and Paige had met up with friends and forgotten to call. It was only after splitting up and tracking down not only the members of the basketball team but also the concert band that Talia, Devon, and Angela discovered that _no one_ had seen the couple since practice ended on Friday afternoon.

Talia and the Krasikevas had regrouped, discussed options, and then spent a fitful night in their respective homes waiting for one or both of the kids to call them.

As soon as the sun was up on Sunday morning, both families had called the Sheriff’s office.

Sheriff Woodruff had left it up to Dean and Deputy Sheila Greenburg-Finstock to take the families’ statements while he rounded up every available officer to start searching the roads between Beacon Hills and Carterston. He had sent the female deputy off afterward to go pick up her fifteen month old kid, Jared, from daycare and drop him off with her husband but instructed her to head towards the preserve immediately after that. Woodruff had then given Dean similar orders, only his were to call Claudia and apologize on Woodruff’s behalf that he’d be very late getting off work before heading off with a couple of deputies and one park ranger.

Dean wasn’t surprised at all to find Talia Hale waiting for them at the entrance to the preserve closest to her house, nor did he argue that she shouldn’t help with the search. After all, she only had one brother, and there was no denying the haunted look in her eyes that he had seemingly vanished into thin air.

The alpha pulled him aside once Sheila arrived, and dropped a bomb that had him gritting his teeth:

A group of alphas had been in the area until sometime late Friday or early Saturday, they had been meeting with a group of hunters in an effort to broker an accord… and the hunter in charge of the meet up had been Gerard Fucking Argent.

(John Winchester had participated in exactly one hunt with the patriarch of the Argent family of werewolf hunters. Dean remembered that he had been the oldest at fourteen, with Argent's son Christopher being closest to him in age at twelve going on thirteen. Sam had been ten, while little Katie had been three and demanding that the boys all play with her. That hadn't been a real issue, except for the part where the little girl had said at least twice that the tea she'd given them at the 'party' was poisoned but that it would only kill monsters.

What he remembered most, however, was the rage in his dad's eyes when he came back to pick them up. He never told them _why_ he was so furious, just that he would never work with Argent again even if his life depended on it. Dean later read about what had happened that day in Dad's journal, and was glad that he hadn't seen any of what the sadistic fuck had orchestrated in his hunt.)

Dean had wisely kept his thoughts to himself, concerned that they wouldn’t be finding two living teenagers but one dead human and one vivisected werewolf; he had his doubts that Gerard had developed any warm and fuzzy feelings for wolves in the twenty years since his dad had met him, and he didn’t want to be the one with the alpha if all they found were corpses.

He had been half-right in his assessment of the situation; four hours after the search began, Dean and Talia almost literally stumbled over Peter curled up at the base of a giant tree stump. He was covered in dirt, clothes torn and bloodied as if he’d been in a fight but had had enough time to heal from his injuries, eyes fixated on Paige’s too still body cradled in his arms. The girl’s head was resting at an odd angle, eyes half-lidded and void of life. Her shirt was ripped to shreds along one side, covered in the same black ocher that was trailing from her nose and mouth.

Dean took a few steps back and radioed to the base camp being manned by rookie Tara Graeme that they had found the kids, requesting an ambulance despite knowing that it was far too late to help. Talia slipped forward and spoke quietly to her brother, gently coaxing Peter into letting go of his girlfriend’s body. The boy argued back that he couldn’t leave Paige alone, that she had pleaded with him to stay, that she had asked him to help her and he did so now he _had_ to stay with her until it was safe. Peter glanced up just once, eyes flashing as his control slipped, and Dean wondered if the fact that the kid had flashed blue instead of gold meant that he’d feel guilt over this moment for the rest of his life.

And just like that, it hit him.

With sudden clarity, Dean just _knew_ that if he was in a similar situation with Claudia, if something happened where one of them was abruptly _gone,_ he would spend the rest of his life regretting that he had never told her that she was the center of his goddamn universe, that she and Johnny were the reason he got up every day and went on with life and felt like he was even _living,_ that he loved her with every breath and every heartbeat.

The rest of the day was hard as hell, even if Sheila had been the one tasked with telling the Krasikevas that their eldest child wouldn’t be coming home from a concert or school or anywhere ever again. Dean spent the time filling out the paperwork, taking Peter’s broken and heavily-edited statement for the official record and getting the real story from Talia once the boy had slipped out of the office to bury himself in his nieces and nephew’s scents. Not for the first time Dean vowed to put a bullet in Argent if he caught wind of him in his town ever again, and possibly adding a bullet for Christopher and Katie, who would have taken up the family business by now themselves, but he kept his opinion to himself.

When he was finally free for the evening, the report turned in to Graeme for filing and the Hales shuffled off to their den in the woods, Dean barely kept from throwing himself into the Impala and breaking the speed limit five times over to get home to his family. Upon arriving, he threw his baby into park, climbed out, and left the door hanging wide open as Claudia stepped outside with their kid on her hip.

“Dean?” she asked, tone worried. “What’s wrong?”

If she was going to add any more, he didn’t give her a chance. Dean reached her in three steps, rested one hand on Johnny’s back affectionately, and kissed the hell out of his wife for the first time ever.

When he pulled back, the first words out of his mouth were, “I love you. I’m sorry, but I love you so much.”

Her response: “Oh, thank God. I thought it was only me. Same. Ditto.”

“Ditto?”

“Shut up, asshole, and kiss me again.”

(No, what Dean would tell his kid was that they fell in love gradually before realizing all at once that what they had was more than just friendship.

Gabriel, on the other hand, would be the one who told him that his parents had been hopeless for almost a fucking year before getting hit with a clue brick.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this, my darlings, is the last chapter for a bit. I've one more completed scene (this is the first I finished up for this year's Camp) but I want to wait until I have another two down before posting the next.
> 
> For the record: I go by the fandom theory that Peter's story about why Derek has blue eyes is actually _his_ story, that it was the older Hale who dated Paige and was the one who had to end her suffering when the Bite didn't take. So this mild allusion is my take on things.
> 
> As for Derek... well, I'm handwaving that shit and saying his eyes went blue post-fire, due to his guilt over "letting" Kate close enough to kill almost everyone he loved. The reason they were still blue in Season Four is because that guilt carried over even if it hadn't happened yet where his younger body was concerned. ~~And it's how his eyes went yellow again, too; he finally let go of the guilt and accepted that it was all on Kate and he wasn't to blame.~~


	6. From the Mouths of Babes

It seemed like only days since the instant he realized he was in love with Claudia Zdzislawa Stilinski, but the fact that Johnny had recently turned three was a testament to how much time had actually gone by. Dean was more than just content with his life, he was actually _happy,_ and he’d found himself becoming a fixture of the Beacon Hills community.

That mainly had to do with the fact that Sheriff Woodruff had announced his retirement effective next month and that he’d handpicked Dean to be his replacement until the actual elections.

Claudia had taken this to mean that it was their responsibility to win over the public during her husband’s six month stint as interim sheriff and then actually be voted into the office. Gabriel had initially thought it was some sort of prank, only to wind up urging the woman’s more outlandish schemes.

Dean had drawn the line and agreed to meet up with people in town who could contribute to or back the campaign that he wasn’t entirely sure he’d agreed to running. One of the first on the list the small, unconventional family had drawn up was David Whittemore.

It made sense, because Whittemore was one of the more prominent attorneys working in town and often took cases in the larger cities both to the north and south of Beacon Hills. It left Dean with a bitter taste in his mouth, however, because Whittemore’s kid was an annoying little shit.

Jackson Whittemore was most likely the bane of Johnny’s three year existence. Claudia was adamant about returning to work once their kid was toddling, so they had enrolled him in the daycare run by Susanne Mahealani right around the same time as the Whittemores enrolled their own son. And where Jackson babbled as much as any three year old, Johnny was… unusually quiet. Up until the stage where words started to become clear in a child, Dean and Claudia’s kid had chattered like he was training for the Olympic Oration Team or some such shit; the second that other kids his age were on first words, however, Johnny had acquired stage fright and clammed up.

That didn’t mean he was stupid or anything, God no. If anything, the kid was way more observant than anyone under the age of ten should be, and Gabriel encouraged the behavior.

“He’ll start talking whenever he’s ready,” the archangel had shrugged when Claudia expressed some concern a few months back. “Then we’ll probably never get him to stop again.”

Dean hated it when that asshole was right.

Said asshole was sitting across from the couple at the dining room table, a bemused expression on his face. “Okay,” he said after a moment in which Dean rubbed his eyes three times and Claudia barely bit back laughter, “what, exactly, happened at this little play date that’s somehow all my fault?”

The former hunter heaved a sigh. “So you know how we’ve been trying to find a time to go visit the Whittemores outside of any work functions, right?” At Gabriel’s nod, he continued, “Well, we finally managed to nab a couple hours on Saturday to set up something of a play date for the boys.”

Here all three adults turned to look at the three year old innocently (ha!) playing in one corner of the room, making race car noises as he rolled a Hot Wheels across the floor.

“Anyway, we got there and set our kid down to play while we talked with David and Michelle,” Dean resumed. “The entire time we were trying to have a conversation, I could hear Jackson being, well…”

“A little shit,” Claudia chimed in, grinning broadly.

Dean nodded and shot fingerguns at his wife. “Exactly. Little bastard kept taking toys right out of our kid’s hands, saying that people who are too dumb to talk can’t play right, and throwing a fit whenever he didn’t get his way.”

His wife added, “I could tell that Michelle was embarrassed over how he was acting, especially when she kept repeating her own kid’s name and going _what did we talk about before the Stilinskis came over,_ even if that only helped for a minute at a time.”

“Anyway, Jackson decided that he wanted the blue car and snatched it away from that one,” here Dean pointed at Johnny. “At which point our brat decided to show off the vocabulary that he’s been picking up and apparently saving for the proper moment to share with the world.”

“Oh hell,” Gabriel said, blinking. “What did he say?”

Dean cleared his throat and repeated his kid’s exact phrasing: “He said, _cut it out, you douche-bag.”_

Claudia promptly cracked up. Again.

Gabriel wasn’t in much better shape. “He didn’t!”

“Yep,” the proud father replied, popping the p. “And when Jackson replied that douche-bag was a bad word, Johnny—”

_“Daddy,”_ said child huffed abruptly from the corner, “I _told_ you already!”

Dean resisted the urge to roll his eyes even as he corrected himself. “Sorry, kiddo. I mean, _Stiles_ told him _no shit, genius_. I mean, it was funny as hell, but I sort of wanted to crawl until the couch and hide there until David and Michelle forgot I was there.”

Claudia had managed to stop cackling, but her shoulders were still shaking slightly. “The best part was when the little punk demanded that David and Michelle do something, and they had to take a moment to collect themselves since they were trying their damnedest not to laugh.”

“Daddy said that deserves pie,” Stiles informed Gabriel, moving from the corner to attempt to crawl into the archangel’s lap.

Gabriel grinned broadly and helped the kid up. “Hell yeah, little man, that calls for pie.”

“With ice cream,” the boy added. “That’s the best way, right?”

Dean smirked. “Dude, a la mode is the _only_ way to eat pie.”

Claudia rolled her eyes fondly as her boys immediately started off on a tangent about what pie went best with what flavor of ice cream. At least the Whittemores had had a sense of humor about the whole thing, Michelle even stating that she’d been trying to get Jackson to share his things with limited success. With any luck, both kids would forget about the incident by the time they started school.

It would suck for them to start a rivalry over a toy car and her kid’s potty mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, may be a bit more time before another update. I... am not having a great evening, which sucks because my work shift went okay for the most part but now I'm worried over my future on the job.
> 
> This is why other people suck, children. Harsh facts, but true.


	7. Wake Me Up When September Ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life takes a turn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time skipping ahead some more in this chapter. I may someday go back and fill in the blanks over the years, but for now the story marches ever onward.

In all his years hunting, years he sometimes wanted to forget about completely, Dean had accepted that sometimes the monster of the week - so to say - wasn’t one that could be fought using bullets or salt or ash. Sometimes schizophrenia was exactly what it looked like, and sometimes cancer victims did crazy-as-fuck shit because they had nothing left to lose. Sometimes families were able to help their loved ones, and sometimes, as happened with John, sometimes the family got fucked over and had to move on somehow.

He had hoped that his happiness in Beacon Hills would continue without life biting him in the ass with his past.

Maybe he should have been careful what he wished for.

Dean had been living in his town for seven years now, most of that time as a husband and father, a good chunk of that as the Sheriff (people actually liked him enough to vote for him more than once. Who knew?), and his main concern aside from reminding Talia Hale that her kids were not subtle in the least (because Derek Hale at sixteen was somehow less subtle than he was at nine, and if Dean caught him driving by the house at ten in the evening again he was going to arrest the little shit just because he could) was that someone from the FBI would connect the Dean Stilinski that Raphael McCall (dick) bitched about with Dean Winchester and end his quiet retirement.

Turned out he should have been more concerned with medical phenomenon fucking up everything.

He sat quietly next to his wife in the doctor’s office, Claudia’s expression confused but dark with worry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I think you said my headaches are from some sort of dementia?”

“I did, Ms. Stilinski,” Dr. Marshall replied. “Frontotemporal dementia. It’s generally hereditary, and usually shows up in the early to mid forties.”

“Then run the fucking tests again,” Claudia said firmly, “because Stiles may be a handful, but I’m still only thirty-two years old, damn it.”

“Your father died in his late thirties, didn’t he?”

Dean blinked and looked over at Claudia. She looked back at him before slowly responding, “Yes, he got very ill and was diagnosed with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s. I’ve been told I could wind up suffering the same as I grow older.”

Dr. Marshall made a soft sound of acknowledgment. “The symptoms _can_ mimic Alzheimer’s,” he noted. “I would like to review the attending physician’s notes, as I’m not sure you remember too much about his final days as you were quite young when he passed, but I believe he had undiagnosed frontotemporal dementia. If you can think of other relatives on your father’s side of the family who died before their sixties who had Alzheimer’s symptoms, I would conclude that they were suffering the same illness.”

“Is there any cure?” Dean asked, catching his wife’s hand and squeezing it tight, feeling her squeeze back just as hard.

The doctor shook his head. “Sadly, there isn’t. There are ways to manage the illness, mostly antidepressants and antipsychotics, but nothing really concrete. If we’re catching the symptoms now, chances are high that you’ve had the condition for at least a few years now.”

Claudia was shaking her head, but Dean was holding his breath. He could think of more than one occasion where his wife had forgotten to create an exam for her students or that Stiles was over at his best friend Scott McCall’s house and called him thinking their son had been kidnapped. He could recall the few times recently when Gabriel had popped in and left Claudia screaming bloody murder because she hadn’t seemed to realize that was how he _always_ dropped in on them.

He could think of many more little instances, and he had chalked them up to Claudia being Claudia, just goofing off.

It had been happening for at least three years. He felt like he should have noticed it wasn’t just a game.

Dean let Claudia lead where questions were involved, listening to the answers and trying to absorb without contributing. His mind was honestly more focused on how they were going to explain to their seven year old that Momma was sick, that she had been sick for a little while, and that she might have to spend some time in the hospital sooner rather than later.

He absently followed his wife from the office to the Impala, feeling almost lost in a fog. The prevalent thought in his head at the moment was that it wasn’t fair, that he’d found Claudia later than he’d have liked to and that their time together was going to be cut much too goddamned short. He shouldn’t be even _contemplating_ burying the love of his life when he wasn’t quite forty yet.

It was only after they climbed into the car and he started the engine that Claudia drew in a wet-sounding breath. Dean turned to look her way, feeling his stomach drop even more at the sight of her holding back her tears.

She turned wet blue-grey eyes to him and let out a shaky sigh. “Do you think…” she began, swallowed, tried again. “Do you think Gabriel might be able to do something about this?”

The ex-hunter frowned to himself, taking a moment to think. “I don’t know,” he replied after a moment, “but it never hurts to ask.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, guys. I love Claudia, but this needs to happen for the narrative's purpose. We're growing slowly closer to Teen Wolf canon now, and I just hope I don't bum too many people out with this and the next chapter.


	8. Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

One year. That was all that Gabriel could manage, neither celestial nor Trickster powers doing very much to halt the rapid degeneration of Claudia’s mind. Within a few months of the diagnosis, the once vibrant woman was jumping at shadows and talking to people who weren’t there, most notably her deceased relatives. On more than one occasion she had forgotten her own name, and when she realized later what happened she’d locked herself in the bathroom to have a private cry.

Gabriel very quickly moved into the house, posing as an old family friend of Dean’s from back east and becoming a fixture in Beacon Hills as Stiles’ fun yet kind of kooky uncle. Most of his time was spent staying close to Claudia, using his powers to appease her headaches and pull her out of “episodes” as quickly as he was able to.

And, because their kid wasn’t an idiot, Dean spent a lot of time with Stiles hanging out at the station after school. The argument could be made that the sheriff’s office wasn’t in any way a proper place for a kid to grow up, but the men and women of the BHSD frankly didn’t agree. If anything, the deputies performed their jobs even more thoroughly to set an example for the seven year old, with Tara - no longer the rookie but still working less hours as she had gone back to school for a teaching degree - taking time out of her afternoons to help Stiles with his homework.

It was definitely not a good year for the Stilinskis and their archangel companion, with the youngest Stilinski’s eighth birthday as one of the last good days Claudia had.

_“Wife, mother, badass bitch. That’s what you need to put on my headstone,” she had stated very firmly as they were cleaning up from their private celebration. Gabriel had snorted in amusement even as Dean rolled his eyes and Stiles giggled from where he was already reading his brand new book on mummification in Ancient Egypt._

_“Clauds, **kids** go to the cemetery,” he said casually as he ran a hand through his hair and grimaced slightly at his reflection in the living room window. This year was aging him, his hair already faded prematurely from the stress of everything. Dean couldn’t even really begin to think about how he was going to raise Stiles on his own._

_Gabriel chimed in to add, “And while Stiles has an impressive repertoire of swear words, not every child in this town talks like a sailor.”_

_Claudia shrugged. “Then it has to be something similar,” she insisted. “I don’t want to be remembered as Crazy Ms. Stilinski who couldn’t remember her own first name at the end; I want to be remembered as Claudia.”_

It was about a month after that that they decided, as a family, that it was time for her to check into the long term care facility at Beacon Hills Memorial.

Now, two months later, Dean’s vivacious, crazy beautiful and just plain goofy wife had become a shell of her former glory. He was on his way for a visit, his shift nearly at an end. Gabriel and Stiles were already there, the archangel having picked up the boy from school after Claudia had specifically asked for her boys to come see her today.

As he turned onto the road that cut past the preserve, the quickest way to get to the hospital, he spotted a car smashed into a tree along the side of the road. The car was totaled, the engine block probably half-way into the cab, and he could almost see someone trapped in the driver’s seat.

Dean grabbed the radio and called it in, requesting an ambulance as he pulled off the road. He climbed out of the squad car and made his way to the wreck, noting that the driver looked to be a girl in her early twenties. From the looks of things, she might not even last long enough for the paramedics to get to her.

Even so, he remained at her side the whole time, providing what comfort he could in her last hours. A part of him lamented missing out on seeing Claudia, despite the fact that he had told her just that morning he loved her; it was while he was saying his goodbyes for the day that she asked for all her boys to come by that afternoon. For the whole day, he’d felt an uneasiness in the air, and worried that a Reaper would soon be coming for his wife.

“You shouldn’t be here, Dean.”

For a second, he thought that it was the girl speaking. Then he realized he _knew_ that voice and jerked his head up to look over the roof of the car.

Tessa smiled mildly at him from the passenger side, one hand resting on the car lightly. “You don’t look happy to see me.”

“I’m really not,” he said evenly. “I mean, I know you’ve got a job to do, but I have a responsibility to help the people of this town.”

“I know,” the Reaper replied. “I’ve seen the shiny star. But you know I have to take this girl with me, and you need to get moving if you’re going to beat me to the hospital.”

Dean closed his eyes, drew in a breath, let it out. “You’re here for Claudia. Already?”

Tessa sighed softly, nodding her head. “Frankly, I should have collected her three months ago,” she said, ignoring Dean’s harsh intake. “Your angel friend gave her a little bit of extra time, so she could be herself in her final hours on Earth.”

“Where are you taking her?” When the Reaper remained silent he snapped, “God damn it, Tessa, just _tell me!”_

The Reaper tilted her head before giving him a sad smile. “She’s good people, Dean,” she finally replied. “Her parents are waiting for her, have been patiently waiting for a long time. They like you, just so you know.” She paused before adding, “I don’t think they were much impressed with _your_ father, but they like you.”

Taking that to mean that his Claudia was headed upstairs instead of down, Dean nodded slightly and turned his attention back to the girl in the car. She had stopped breathing sometime in the past several seconds; when the sheriff looked up again he saw Tessa leading the same girl away. In the distance he could finally hear the ambulance’s sirens approaching.

“Gabriel,” he said softly, “if you can hear me, tell Clauds I love her, and I’m sorry that I missed seeing her today.”

He could only hope that the bastard heard him and delivered his message.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And for now, that's the last entirely sad chapter. Next one is written, but I'll sit on it a few days until I have another in reserve as well.
> 
> Please don't hate me too much.


	9. Better Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life goes on.

It was a terrible thing to admit, but Dean couldn’t _really_ remember too much of the three months following Claudia’s death.

Oh, he could recall the funeral. All the people who came to pay their last respects to his wife, to the ray of crazy sunshine that lit up so many lives in their town. Talia and her brood, even Laura taking a week off from her junior year at Berkley joining a very solemn Derek and Cora whom if he remembered correctly was nine years old herself now, keeping off to one side with Peter. Stiles having cried himself out That Night in the hospital, quiet and clinging to Dean’s hand throughout the service.

His memories after that were… vague at best. He knew Gabriel kept popping in and out, trying to help keep things moving smoothly in the house and making sure that there was a second person close by if Stiles needed anything. Which was a good thing, because Dean found himself staying late at the station more nights than not, and it was a relief knowing that someone was there for his son.

Any time spend at home was a blur, because all he could see everywhere were hints of Claudia that he wasn’t equipped to deal with at the moment. It was far easier to grab a bottle of scotch or whiskey and drink until he couldn’t remember whether or not the throw on the sofa was one that had been there when he moved into the house or if it had been purchased later.

The only reason he finally pulled his head out of his ass - and those were his own words, not Gabriel’s - was when he woke up on said sofa one morning, covered by said throw, not knowing how the fuck it got there and realizing that he smelled coffee and burnt toast coming from the kitchen. When he pulled himself up and wandered into the room to find his eight year old kid, who shouldn’t have been up for at least another hour, scraping the worst of the burns from the toast and looking guilty when he realized Dean was in the room.

When his eight year old apologized for burning the toast because he was trying to figure out how to not burn the eggs. Because this was the first time in nearly three months that they were both home for breakfast and Stiles wanted to surprise his dad because they hadn’t had a meal together in just as long.

The first thing Dean did was pull his kid into a hug and cry on him. The second was calling Gabriel - because unlike Cas, the ex-Trickster made sure to have the latest mobile device _and_ kept it charged at all times - and thank him for basically keeping his kid alive while he was lost in the bottom of a bottle. The third thing he did was gather all the alcohol in the house except for a bottle that had been Claudia’s and poured every goddamn drop down the drain.

It wasn’t easy, not in the least, going from pickling his liver every night to not having even a beer after a long day at the station, but he had been so lost that he hadn’t realized that his kid was having to turn into a tiny adult in order to keep their lives from collapsing completely around them. Gabriel only told him two months after he sobered up that Stiles had told him everything was okay, that Dean was just really busy with work and it was cool if he taught the kid to cook a little bit.

Which, really, explained the abundance of rice and pasta dishes that had been turning up in the fridge whenever he’d clawed his way through a hangover to get something to eat.

It still wasn’t the greatest feeling in the world, knowing that he’d been so lost in his own grief over losing the love of his life that he’d all but forgotten about their son. And that shit was so far from acceptable, it was at John Winchester levels of parenting fail.

So to make up for the lost time, Dean had been taking time off where he could - there were benefits to being the sheriff of a not-really-that-small town, after all - to spend time with his kid doing anything Stiles wanted. And while most days the boy wanted to just stay at home with his dad, some of the time he wanted to be out for father-son outings.

Which was why this clear Saturday morning in late-March - God bless California, Northern California in early spring was pretty awesome and he would miss this bit of weather once summer finally hit - found them in the Southwood Park, one of the nicer parks in town close to the woods but neither part of the preserve nor on the Hales’ property. There was plenty for a kid to do - basketball courts where Dean was positive he spotted Derek and Peter Hale dicking around, slides and monkey bars in the dedicated playground area, the sandbox where Stiles had pissed on Scott McCall’s sandcastle at age four and somehow made a best friend for life, even a small lacrosse pitch because this town had some fucking weird obsessions - and Stiles was delighting in dragging his dad all over the park. They’d spent half an hour at the lacrosse pitch until the younger Stilinski had nearly gotten into a fistfight with Jackson Whittemore over an argument on which of them would be team captain in school (and what the fuck? High school was still a good seven years away!) and Dean had led his kid towards the walking path along the tree line in hopes of curbing some of his energy.

They had just started past the basketball courts when a ball smacked into the fence and Dean instinctively reached for a gun that wasn’t there as Stiles let out a startled shriek at the sound. The sheriff turned to see that his assessment of smartass Hales hanging around had been correct, because Peter, who was still as much of a snarky pain in the ass at twenty-five as he’d been at seventeen, was smirking at them through the silver wire.

“Sorry about that,” he said smoothly, expression screaming that he wasn’t sorry at all. “It looks like the ball got away from my nephew there for a minute.” He leaned closer to the fence and stage-whispered, “He really kind of sucks at this game, I don’t know why I bother playing against him.”

_“Hey!”_ came the indignant shout of wounded seventeen-year-old boy, heralding Derek’s approach. And goddamn, either the kid was halfway towards wolfing out in public or his eyebrows had gotten really fuzzy with the onset of puberty. They were probably capable of communicating all on their own at this point.

Stiles, the little shit, had taken about point-five-three seconds to realize that they were in the presence of part of the local wolf pack and his eyes had lit up with mischief. Dean knew what was coming and was able to clamp one hand over his kid’s mouth right before he opened it to let out a mocking little wolf howl.

Apparently, that was his newest thing to do. Dean had noted it about two years previously, right before Claudia had started to worry that she was sick and gone to the doctor, and had been _right_ on hand to hear Stiles howl at Cora Hale and the goddamn alpha herself. Thank fuck that the little girl had just given a startled blink, slowly grinned, and howled a legitimate werewolf howl right back; Stiles had been _delighted_ and the two had play-growled and whined and howled at each other the entire time Dean tried to apologize to Talia. The alpha had just laughed and assured him that it was fine, and that she would give her family fair warning.

Stiles hadn’t done it at all since Claudia’s death, not at the funeral or any other time they’d crossed paths with the Hale wolves during the past several months. If the kid was doing it now, it was either (1) because he was starting to recover from the trauma of being in the same room as his mother when she’d been taken away nearly ten months ago or (2) because he was just as much of a smartass as the Hale boys and was fucking with them.

Judging by the amused look on Peter’s face and the scowl on Derek’s, they could hear the muffled howl just fine. Option (2) it was, then.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dean said easily, smiling mildly even though he wanted to cackle at the younger wolf’s annoyed look. “I couldn’t play basketball worth a damn at any age, and I fear this one,” here he gave Stiles a little shake, hand still over his mouth but doing nothing to muffle the boy’s giggles, “is gonna wind up half-killing himself trying to play lacrosse when he gets older.”

Both Hales looked horrified, likely at the thought that _anyone_ would prefer lacrosse to basketball despite the whole town’s obsession with the damned sport.

Peter cleared his throat. “Well,” he offered, “he’s still young yet. If he takes after Ms. Stilinski then Stiles might manage cross country without doing himself permanent bodily harm.”

Now Stiles looked affronted, and was tugging at Dean’s hand in order to be able to talk clearly. Given that he knew how his kid tended to express his extensive vocabulary when he was pissed off, the older Stilinski wisely kept his hand locked in place.

“Maybe,” he replied with a shrug. “That’s still a good four or five years out. I’ll worry on that when it becomes a possible issue. Anyway,” he added, tugging on his kid lightly and turning to steer him away from the wolves, “we need to start back. We’re getting lunch out then headed home to watch some movies.”

Derek continued to scowl, his eyebrows doing most of the talking there, while Peter offered a pleasant smile and a wave. “Take care, Sheriff Stilinski,” he said blithely. “I’ll have my sister call and invite you over for dinner sometime soon.”

Dean nodded, knowing already that the invitation was just offered for courtesy’s sake, and started back down the path. He dropped his hand from his kid’s mouth as they walked, and Stiles turned slightly to offer one final parting shot:

“Bye, Sourwolf!”

Dean and Peter both cracked up, and Stiles just grinned proudly up at his dad. The little shit was probably going to tell Gabriel all about this the next time the angel dropped by, he just knew it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, recovery is going for the small family, and it was a bit nice writing a bit of happy.
> 
> Which is good, because there's one, _maybe_ two more bits of happy before shit hits the fan again.


	10. Lazy Days

There had been a point in time, back before Claudia’s dementia had only been a potential issue instead of the death sentence it turned out to be, that the Stilinskis had found they needed a sitter at least a few days out of the week. Claudia had returned to teaching not too long after Stiles was born, and while daycare had been a godsend for most days, they’d forgotten about parent-teacher conferences and the day-to-day schedule of a newbie deputy.

Back then, Gabriel had been _more_ than happy to help out. Even so, there were times when the archangel had other issues to take care of (just because Dean had retired didn’t mean that shit still wasn’t going down on the regular, some of which required something akin to divine intervention, and Bobby took advantage of having an angel on hand when it was necessary), and although in later years Dean would have Melissa McCall as a friend and fellow single parent there was still a need for _someone_ to keep an eye on his much-loved hyperactive little spaz.

That was how Laura Hale wound up watching Stiles twice a week for about five years, up until she went off to college.

So it wasn’t really much of a surprise for Dean to come back from the station one Saturday afternoon shortly after summer began to find the eldest Hale child, freshly turned twenty-two and preparing for her final year of school, sitting in his living room with Stiles watching _The Empire Strikes Back_ and eating popcorn.

“Hiya, Sheriff S!” the young woman chirped, grinning brightly from where she was flopped across the couch and half lying on his kid. Stiles absently waved, eyes locked on the screen and looking much like his mother when she was absorbed in whatever she was doing.

“Good afternoon, Laura,” he replied. “Stiles, did you clean your room like I asked?”

His son huffed in annoyance and rolled his expressive brown eyes, eyes he’d inherited from his bio-dad. _“Yes_ , Dad,” he said, “and I even took out the garbage before Laura got here. Who invited herself, by the way, this wasn’t my idea.”

“Bullshit,” the werewolf sang. “You called me two hours ago saying you were _so bored_ and that Scott had to go see his dickweed of a sperm donor and that he _still_ hasn’t seen Star Wars so could I come over and hang out.”

Stiles fixed the woman with a betrayed look before turning his attention to Dean. “Werewolves are assholes, Dad,” he stated almost solemnly; the tone was ruined by the smirk trying to cross his lips.

Laura responded by smacking Stiles with a couch cushion.

The only actual goddamn adult in the house sighed, rolled his eyes, and headed to the kitchen to get a beer. He still didn’t keep much alcohol in the house these days, mostly because it would be too easy to crawl right back into a bottle and forget his responsibilities, but he did buy a six-pack once a week and limit himself to one a night. It wasn’t the healthiest way to cope with an addiction, but at least he wasn’t hooked on demon blood like Sammy had been.

Laura stayed long enough to finish _Empire_ then watch all of _Return of the Jedi_ before announcing that she needed to at least pretend to be sociable with her family and headed back to her own home. Dean and Stiles straightened up the living room, the elder Stilinski offering to make it pizza night and placing an order once the younger agreed and proceeded to clean up his (and Laura’s) popcorn mess. It didn’t take long for dinner to arrive, and they ate in the dining room with Dean glancing over some files he’d brought home from the office and Stiles flipped through one of the Harry Potter books; Dean _thought_ it was the latest one, something about a phoenix, but the kid had all five books so it may have been any of them.

“Hey, Dad?” Stiles asked, glancing up with a frown. Dean made a sound to show he was listening, prompting his kid to continue with, “I know werewolves are a thing, but are witches real, too?”

“Bitches is probably more accurate a term, but yeah,” he replied. “So are ghosts, ghouls, vampires, demons--”

“I knew _that,”_ the boy replied with an eyeroll worthy of a Winchester; Dean felt abruptly, stupidly proud of that fact. “I was just wondering if anything like Hogwarts was a real place.”

Dean put down the folder for a moment and frowned thoughtfully. “If there is,” he decided after a moment, “then it’s a very well-kept secret. Maybe you should ask Uncle Bobby about it, he might have something on it in his library.”

Stiles thought about that and nodded. “Yeah, Uncle Bobby has books on everything,” he agreed before turning his attention back to the book. Dean spotted the spine and noted that it was _Prisoner of Azkaban,_ and decided that the combination of fictional werewolves and a wizarding school had spurred this particular question.

He smiled to himself as he went back to reviewing his case files. If he’d still been doing the hunter gig, his kid would take to the training like a duck to water. As it was, Dean was doing his best to make sure Stiles was prepared to keep himself safe in a world where the things that went bump in the night were all too real.

Hell, he’d already had Gabriel use his angel mojo to give Stiles both an anti-possession tattoo that would grow with him (and thus remain forever effective) and angel-proofing Enochian on his ribcage. The only bad thing to come from it was that the archangel had done them at the same time so chances of the kid ever getting any other tattoos or even dealing well with needles were highly unlikely.

Dean snorted to himself, waving a hand when his kid gave him an annoyed look. What were the chances of Stiles being in a situation where he’d be around someone getting a tattoo, anyway?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more bit of fluff after this, and then... *insert villain laugh here*


	11. Word to the Wise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek needs some advice. Dean is a good listener.

The thing was, Dean knew that his kid was a bit of a loner.

He got that, he really did. Despite how many people in Beacon Hills had adored Claudia and all of her oddities, the woman he’d married had only had one or two really close friends: one was Elizabeth from three blocks down, who’d gone through high school and college with his wife, and was pregnant close enough to Claudia’s that her daughter, Heather, had been in the same kindergarten group as Stiles despite her birthday being in September; the other was Tina from the diner, another high school bestie who had kept close even though she’d decided to skip out on higher education to start her own family.

And Dean couldn’t really talk, as his current group of close friends included an archangel who’d masqueraded as Loki for a few hundred years, a semi-retired hunter who acted as honorary uncle to his kid, and the alpha of the local werewolf pack. So it was no big shock to the former hunter that his own kid kept a close-knit, small circle of friends.

The first was, beyond all reasoning, Scott McCall. How someone pissing all over your sandcastle made a lifelong bond of brotherhood was beyond Dean’s reasoning, but somehow his kid and the McCall boy made it work in their own twisted little way.

The second was a girl he’d met in first grade by the name of Erica Reyes. The poor kid missed school more often than not for doctor’s appointments due to her epilepsy, yet Stiles was a devoted little son of a bitch and made sure to collect her assignments whenever she missed a lesson or five. Tomas and Monica, the girl’s parents, were grateful for the help Dean’s kid offered and didn’t even mind if he spent the night every so often.

The third, and the one that baffled Dean above the other two completely, was Derek Hale.

The Derek Hale who was as much of a little shit as his uncle, who was entering his final year of high school, who was apparently dating some girl his family hadn’t met (and which Dean knew _all_ about because Talia had lamented that fact over coffee more than once since summer ended), and who had come over a few times during Laura’s babysitting adventures only to cause just as much trouble for the girl as Stiles had.

Dean never minded when any of Stiles’ friends popped over, he just liked to have a little bit of warning. With Scott it was mostly because even though Melissa tended to be perfectly fine with her son being at the sheriff’s, it was still nice to be forewarned just in case the kid had an asthma attack so that there’d be a spare inhaler at the ready. With Erica, it was in full because of her medical condition, because it was never fun having to deal with potential triggers and wind up calling the ambulance before dinner was even over.

It had happened twice, and he’d wound up letting Stiles sleep in his room because the boy was convinced both times that Erica’s episodes had somehow been his fault.

With Derek, he preferred some warning because the wall-to-wall snark was impossible to deal with. On oh so many levels, because it was hard as hell _not_ to chime in with his own commentary once the boys were on a roll.

Today, though, when he walked in to find the middle Hale child in his living room, it wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise, though, was that Stiles wasn’t hovering about to find out why the werewolf was hanging around on a random Thursday during the week before his tenth birthday. It was pretty clear that his kid was of the opinion that when adults or teenagers were at the house and he was closing in on a birthday it could only mean that he _had_ to take the opportunity to try and pry party details out of them. Which he had been doing since he started talking, and apparently only now decided was annoying and should be a practice that was retired.

“Derek,” Dean greeted, closing the door behind him and peeking into the dining room to find Stiles doing homework with Erica and the Martin girl (whom his kid claimed to be in love with. Further investigation revealed that Stiles was just playing interested because _Jackson_ liked the girl, and his little shit just couldn’t resist being an ass to that particular brat. Dean let it go on because it was kind of fucking hilarious). “You didn’t exactly mention why you wanted to see me when you called the station today.”

The teenager flushed slightly and looked at the floor. “My mom was in the room and I didn’t want her to overhear us talking,” he admitted. “Especially since it’s sort of about Katie and how she’s older and all that.”

“How much older are we talking here?” Dean asked, alarm bells going off in his head. The kid sitting on his couch had just turned eighteen at the end of December after all, and so far as he knew Derek had been seeing this girl since school started up again.

“She’s taking classes at BHCC.”

Dean relaxed a little, but was still somewhat wary. That could mean this girl was somewhere between nineteen and twenty-two, close enough to Laura’s age that it wasn’t a bit deal; it could also mean that this was less a girl and more a grown-ass woman taking some extra courses towards self-improvement while her kids were at school.

“Anyway,” Derek continued, oblivious to the sheriff’s concerns, “prom is coming up in the next few weeks, and I sort of wanted to ask Katie to go with me. I’m just…”

“Worried that your mom with freak out and forbid you from seeing this girl anymore,” Dean filled in the blanks. It certainly seemed like a Talia sort of thing to do, especially when she’d been less than thrilled about Laura taking a boy from three towns away to her prom as a date. The alpha had actually had Dean look into the kid’s background to see if it was safe enough to let things slide. All he’d discovered was that Jordan Parrish was a _something_ but not dangerous, and Talia had relaxed just enough to not send Peter following as a bodyguard.

(Peter, it had to be noted, skipped his own prom. When Dean had asked about that, the beta had looked at him, flashed his eyes bright blue, and said dully, “Why should I when I can’t go with Paige?”

The subject had been immediately dropped, and never revisited.)

Derek lifted one hand to bite at his thumbnail, looking at the older man from the corner of his eye. “I mean, I’ve mentioned it to Katie in passing, but she said that she’d be uncomfortable going if my mom was going to be uncomfortable with it.”

“That’s mature of her,” Dean said slowly, mentally reassessing the unknown girl’s age. Maybe mid-twenties, which was a bit more skeezy than he would be comfortable with were it Stiles in the same situation. “Are you asking me if you should take this girl home to meet your family and let your mom form an opinion, or are you hoping I’ll tell you to sneak out to prom with her?”

The young wolf deflated. “I don’t know, Sheriff, sir,” he replied. “I mean, I really _like_ this girl. She could be the one, I think.” Dean bit back the urge to tell the kid _he_ hadn’t found his one, his Jess so to speak, until he was already thirtysomething. “And I don’t want to do anything that might cause bad blood between her and my family.”

Dean let the kid sit in silence for a moment before speaking. “I think you may already know the answer to the question you keep skirting around, son.”

Derek frowned at him, blinking slowly before nodding. “Yeah, I do.” He heaved a sigh and stood up, accepting a quick handshake and pat on the arm from the sheriff. “Thanks for, you know, just listening to me try to sort my shit out.”

The older man snorted. “You’ve met my kid. Hell, you _like_ my kid,” he clarified. “Being a good listener is part and parcel of raising that boy.”

Even as the wolf left, Dean still found himself worrying over just how much older this girl might really be, and mentally started sorting through the procedure for making an arrest in a statutory case.

Three days later, the Hale house was burnt to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... yeah. That happened, huh? *hides until next chapter is ready for posting*


	12. Old Familiar Faces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bwahahahaha!

By the time the fire had been contained, there wasn’t much left to the Hale house. The exterior walls were still standing, scorched and water-damaged. The fire chief had sent two of his men in, who had reported back that the entire upper level of the house was a wash and that there wasn’t much left to the first floor either. The basement, which had doubled as a rec room and full moon containment for when the younger wolves of the pack had less than perfect control, was by far the worst-damaged section of the house.

That was where all eight of the bodies they’d recovered were found: Talia, both of her grandmothers and her grandfather, another brother who was between the alpha and Peter and who had been purely human, his just as human wife, and their two young children, only one of whom was a wolf, and both of whom had been younger than Stiles.

Cora was conspicuous in her absence, and the only theory on what may have happened to the young girl was that she had been too close to the point of origin and burnt away to nothing. Derek had been at school, and Laura had been on her way home from Berkley for the weekend. Peter was found outside of the house, badly burnt and - of great significance to Dean - not showing any signs of his preternatural healing.

Now, almost a week later, the fire had officially been deemed an accident caused by faulty electrical wiring.

Off the record, Dean knew that was bullshit of the highest order. John Winchester hadn’t raised any fuckwits, and the sheriff _knew_ that there was no good reason for darker ash to have been lining the doors and windows of the house.

And _yes,_ he may have tasted it. He’d needed to be positive that the wolves had been locked in - or in Peter’s case, locked out - by mountain ash and that confirmation along with Derek’s odd phone call from ‘Katie’ just after the remaining Hale kids had been taken to the station was all he needed to start building his unofficial case:

There had been another fucking _Argent_ in his town, and the psychotic blonde apple hadn’t fallen far from the crazy old bastard tree at all.

Dean had managed to gather a few of his most trusted deputies - Tara Graeme and Sheila Greenburg-Finstock most definitely, and a couple of the guys who’d been deputies back when he’d been the rookie himself - and shared his suspicions that the fire was an arson, despite what the investigator had concluded. He’d been relieved to find that the other four agreed with him, and was pleased when they offered to help investigate on the sly. The case file was still rather thin, nothing more than Dean’s statement of what he’d overheard during Derek’s phone conversation and Trent Woodruff’s look into the investigator’s finances, but it was still a start.

“Sheriff?”

Tara smiled apologetically at Dean as he startled out of his thoughts, gaze lifting from the file he was rereading for the fifth time without processing anything new. He’d just recently sent Laura and Derek Hale running as far from Beacon Hills as they could get - he may have used the words, “Officially it was an accidental fire, but unofficially you two need to get the fuck out of here before another accident happens to take you out as well, I’ll keep an eye on your uncle” - and was trying to shuffle through the legal ramifications of being named the official executor of the Hale estate so that he could make sure no more damage happened to the wolf who was still neither healing nor waking up even now.

“What’s up, Tara?” he asked, putting aside the paperwork for the moment. He’d have David Whittemore look everything over and dumb it down for him later. Right now he had a deputy who looked confused and wary standing in his office doorway.

“There’s an FBI agent here to see you,” the woman said. “He mentioned that he’s been following a series of arsons in other states that have similar earmarks to the Hale fire, wanted to see if he could talk to you about the case.”

That was… weird, astonishingly timely, and not a little suspicious. After all, he and Sammy had posed as law enforcement a _lot_ while investigating hunts. Dean narrowed his eyes and found himself asking, “What’s this agent’s name?”

“Christopher Hynde, I think was what he said.”

 _Christopher. Son of a bitch,_ Dean thought, biting back the urge to blurt his thoughts out. Aloud he managed an even-sounding, “Show him in, please.”

Tara nodded and slipped out towards the front of the station, obviously relieved that she didn’t have to deal with the supposed agent any further, and Dean stood up to put the paperwork aside to take home when he left for the day. He had no plans of staying late, not with Stiles getting out of school in the next hour. He hadn’t raised a latchkey kid, and he wasn’t going to leave his ten year old unsupervised with all his go-to sitters either blowing town - and that included Gabriel, who was off dispensing instant karma on some unsuspecting jackass the next county over - or in a coma.

His back was to the door when he heard the knock, and he waved a hand over his shoulder. “My deputy said you wanted to discuss a case, Agent?” he asked casually as he turned around.

He didn’t exactly hear what the man in the suit said. Three things were obvious within a fraction of a second:

1\. The man who’d walked into his office was a hunter.

2\. The hunter was, indeed, someone he knew.

3\. The son of a bitch looked like way too much like John Winchester wearing lifts in his shoes for there to be any mistake as to his identity.

Dean wondered if it would be bad form to call Bobby right now and cuss him out for neglecting to mention that _Sammy was somehow back from hell_ and in Beacon Hills right the fuck now.

Seriously. His favorite not-really-uncle was getting a goddamn earful this evening.

“Sheriff?”

And that would be Sam locking onto the fact that Dean wasn’t paying much attention to his words. Some things really didn’t change too much; that was definitely an epic bitchface that his little brother was fighting off at the moment, and he very nearly allowed himself to be amused more than annoyed and slightly pissy.

Nearly.

“Sorry, Agent Hynde, was it?” At the taller man’s nod, Dean heaved a purely mental sigh. Now that he thought about it, Claudia had facetiously introduced herself that way back the day they met; trust his little brother to keep with Dean’s method of choosing aliases and upping the ante a bit. “It’s been a very long week, what with the Hale tragedy and the fact that everyone in town liked the family. I was fairly close friends with the matriarch.”

“My condolences,” Sam replied, actual empathy showing on his face for a moment before he schooled it. “I don’t know if your deputy mentioned it, but the bureau has been following a series of arsons that have similar earmarks to the Hale fire,” he continued. “Has there been any official conclusion to the case?”

Dean’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Kate Argent was enough of a psychopath to have utilized similar methods of, ahem, extermination in the past, but he hadn’t actually looked into the issue beyond calling Bobby to complain about the mountain ash surrounding the house. It seemed that his old friend had decided to take it upon himself to look deeper, and then get Sammy involved.

Unless it had been Sam doing the initial legwork after that phone call. Goddammit, Bobby.

Dean waved for his brother to take a seat, walking over to the door. “The initial investigation has concluded that the fire was an accident,” he said evenly as he pushed it shut. He flipped the lock and pulled down the blinds before adding, “But off the record, we both know that’s bullshit.”

Sam actually broke character for a moment, eyes widening slightly before he managed to hide his reaction. “Ah, do we?” he asked, and that was just _it._

“Seriously, I don’t know who I want to punch out more right now, you or Bobby,” Dean fumed. “You’d be the more obvious choice, since I don’t have the time right now to go on a road trip what with the _fucking fire_ that wiped out nearly the entire local wolf population,” and here his brother went right back to stunned, wide-eyed staring, “not to mention other responsibilities, and do you know just how close you came to getting shot right now?!”

“Um,” Sam said slowly, “what?”

Dean threw his hands up. “Seriously? Christopher? After a fucking Argent _just_ waltzed through my town and left a trail of bodies in her wake, you roll up using _another_ Argent’s given name? Did you hit your head on the way out of hell or were you always this dense and I somehow never noticed it?”

His brother now looked somewhere between confused, stunned, and pissy. It was definitely bitchface time. “I don’t know what your talking about,” he said evenly, although the tone implied that he’d love to smack Dean a good one.

The sheriff snorted. _“Of course_ you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he groused, adding, “bitch,” out of lifelong habit.

“Jerk,” came the immediate response, followed by Sam freezing. It was actually kind of hilarious, and Dean found himself wishing he had a camera or even that his phone was close enough to grab so he could preserve the moment.

There was a beat of silence. Then:

_“Dean?!”_

“Finally,” Dean sighed, rolling his eyes and flinging himself into his desk chair. He rubbed at his eyes before adding, “Took you long enough. What’d Bobby tell you to get your ass here?”

Sam continued to stare for a moment, obviously still stunned at not only finding that his brother had retired to small town life but was an authority figure, before settling more easily into his chair. And it was still creepy as fuck how much he looked like Dad. “He mentioned that there was a house fire in Northern California that pinged as unusual,” he finally replied. “Said that there were others all over the country that seemed to follow the same pattern: no real known cause found in official reports, friends and neighbors insisting that there had been no way that the fires were accidental, fire investigators retiring rather suddenly after the investigations were concluded, that sort of thing.”

“Did you look into any of them?” the elder brother asked, sitting up straight and leaning forward.

The younger didn’t disappoint. “I went to interview the lead on the most recent fire prior to the Hale house,” Sam said. “Apparently there was a thick, dark ash found lining several of the doors and windows. They presumed that there was something in the wood varnish that had been used in those spots that left it darker than the rest.”

“Son of a bitch. They’ve done this shit more than once.”

“Dean,” Sam said, “there are currently fifty house fires on record, in different states from here to halfway across the country, that almost exactly mirror this one.”

Dean felt his eyes widen. “Almost exactly?”

“None of the other fires have had survivors.”

Neither of them had to finish Sam’s thought aloud: _And there’s a good chance the Argents will come back to finish the job._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um, yeah.
> 
> I had a chat with my beloved, Apollymi, on who I should have portray an older Sam Winchester since I'm obviously using Jensen for younger Dean and Linden as Sheriff!Dean. We came to the conclusion of why the fuck not, so Jeffery Dean Morgan in lifts is playing the role of Older!Sam in this fic. Because I said so, that's why.
> 
> Also: Nope, I'm not updating the character tags. I want newcomers to the fic to find out about Sam's appearance when they get here, goddammit, not wade through the first 11 chapters wondering where the hell he is.


	13. Interlude: Sam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief look in on Sam and his life after the Apocalypse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh... hi again?
> 
> I know it's been a while, but life is kind of insane when one is working 40+ hours every week at a restaurant and being basically indispensable to the point of constant overtime. I've honestly had no energy to write, and my last few days off were spent sleeping, going to see _Mad Max Fury Road,_ going to see _Jurassic World,_ having excessive raptor feels, going back to see both movies one more time, and sleeping. But it's time once more for Camp NaNo, and I'm picking this back up again.
> 
> And now, a few notes on narrative for those who may not have been paying attention (this WILL be repeated in the end notes for those who still aren't listening in the back of the room):
> 
> 1\. Author does not acknowledge any Supernatural canon past the end of Season 5.  
> 2\. Author does not acknowledge any Teen Wolf canon past the end of Season 2.  
> 3\. Elements from later seasons of Teen Wolf may be utilized, and altered, at the author's whim. See Paige and her relationship with Peter in Chapter Five of this story.  
> 4\. Elements from later seasons of Supernatural will NOT be utilized except for only brief nods if needed for the narrative. This means no Leviathan or Souless!Sam or MarkofCain!Dean.  
> 5\. Comments asking about such elements will either be summarily ignored by the author or mocked mercilessly by the author and her beta reader.
> 
> And without further ado, enjoy!

Sam honestly hadn’t expected to run into his brother again. Especially not this way.

He’d managed to claw his way out of hell, somehow leaving Lucifer locked away behind him, and tracked Dean down just to be sure he’d kept his promise. The elder Winchester had been with Lisa and Ben when he’d found him, and Sam had decided… well, he’d decided to be a solo act from there on.

Dean had done more than enough for the world; he deserved retirement.

Sam’s next move was getting in touch with Bobby, who had made him jump through every figurative hoop one could imagine to not only verify that he was alive but that he was in possession of his soul and not even mildly demonic in nature. Frankly, he still mentally thought of the ordeal as Hell Week, and _yes,_ he was fully aware that there was some measure of irony in that given that he’d literally been to hell and back.

Still, once his father’s oldest friend had reassured himself that Sam was Sam, Bobby had wasted no time at all giving him something to go after. There were still demons roaming the world, after all, and all manner of other things that went bump in the night (and in the morning, and at midday, and select Thursday afternoons every other week) that needed to be investigated. The only remaining active Hunter in the Winchester family eagerly threw himself back into the life, making sure to check in with Bobby and the other Hunters he’d made contact with during his travels.

Granted, there were families that he did his best to avoid making contact with. He’d only had to go on one hunt with one Katherine Argent to decide that (1) the bitch was out of her goddamned mind and (2) she was on a crash course for a one-way ticket to the same hell he’d dragged his sorry carcass out of, and if that was what she wanted more power to her. Sam wasn’t going to help her get there any faster unless she crossed the line; at that point he would happily put a bullet to her and send his condolences to her surviving relatives.

As the years slipped by, he continued to network with other Hunting families - more than a few of whom were also happy to ignore the insanity that was the Argent clan - and keep in contact with Bobby on any developments that he needed to be aware of. Sam had made one covert visit in that time to Cicero to look in on Dean, only to discover that he’d apparently left town several years prior.

Lisa had been polite enough when he asked after his brother, but apologetically added that she hadn’t heard from Dean since a year or so after he’d went back on the road. The only thing she could really tell him was that Dean had called her to ask how Ben was doing, to say that he had finally found a place to rest his head, and to let her know that he was happy.

After that, Sam went back out and kept on doing what he was best at these days.

It was Bobby that talked him into taking some online law school courses, in the event that he ever decided to follow in his brother’s footsteps and retire for good; it also served to help Sam take his mind off the hunts that went pear-shaped or when he couldn’t save someone, either human or innocent supernatural. He couldn’t really forget about the fire in his own hometown, where a family of four that turned out to be a small pack of werewolves were burned alive in the supposed safety of their own home.

Not when he’d spotted what he thought was a pair of Argent goons a few days prior to the tragedy.

It was ten years after the last time he’d seen his brother with his own eyes, four years after what he mentally dubbed as the Lawrence Pack Fire, and two years after he’d looked in the mirror one morning and wondered when the fuck he’d started to look so much like his dad that Bobby called with a case.

 _“House fire in Northern California,”_ he’d said in that same gruff manner he always had. _“Local investigators are saying it was an accidental fire, but a LEO friend of mine in the town thinks it was arson. Eight known casualties.”_

“That’s tragic, Bobby,” Sam had replied, frowning to himself and wondering if growing a mustache would make him look less like John Winchester, “but isn’t it the job of the local law enforcement to investigate this kind of thing?”

Then Bobby dropped the bomb, the one that made him look closer at the Lawrence fire and several dozen more in nearly every state across the continent: _“It would be, if nearly the entirety of the Hale family weren’t a pack of werewolves.”_

A week later, Sam found himself armed with the knowledge of fifty house fires that were declared accidental by investigators who retired quickly after the verdict, the suspicion that all the families killed had been werewolf packs, and a serious need to gather information on the Hale fire to see if the pattern fit. The deputy who’d greeted him initially gave him a smile that didn’t meet her eyes when he offered his (fake) ID and name (Dean would be proud of him for continuing the tradition of rock star names) before asking him to wait a moment while she checked if the sheriff was available.

She was back only a few minutes later, fake smile still in place as she led Sam to the sheriff’s office and knocked on the door once before stepping away. Sam pulled on his federal officer persona and stepped confidently into the office of one Sheriff D. Stilinski of the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department.

Fifteen minutes later, he was facing the reality that old hunters never really retire, they just change career paths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To reiterate on the author notes above in regards to the narrative, for those who weren't paying attention before:
> 
> 1\. Author does not acknowledge any Supernatural canon past the end of Season 5.  
> 2\. Author does not acknowledge any Teen Wolf canon past the end of Season 2.  
> 3\. Elements from later seasons of Teen Wolf may be utilized, and altered, at the author's whim. See Paige and her relationship with Peter in Chapter Five of this story.  
> 4\. Elements from later seasons of Supernatural will NOT be utilized except for only brief nods if needed for the narrative. This means no Leviathan or Souless!Sam or MarkofCain!Dean.  
> 5\. Comments asking about such elements will either be summarily ignored by the author or mocked mercilessly by the author and her beta reader.


	14. Family Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean drags Sam home for dinner. Stiles is unimpressed with this new uncle in his life.

It probably said a lot about Dean’s life up to this point that the most shocking news of the day was that his little brother was back from hell and still living the life of a Hunter. And while he was a bit floored by just how many packs, how many families the Argents had wiped out over the past few years, he couldn’t really claim to be too surprised that it was likely little Katie growing up to be a fully functional psychotic bitch.

He offered his computer to Sam, rising from his chair and heading off to get some coffee while his brother pulled up the information he’d gathered during his week of research. Dean took a moment to let his deputies know that “Detective Hynde” could be trusted to assist on the case, noting Tara’s _you got to be kidding me_ expression along with Sheila’s look of despair of ever finding five minutes alone with her husband and kid this week before stepping back into his office and firmly shutting the door behind him once again.

About an hour later, he was dragging Sam out of the station house and firmly informing him to follow in the black sedan that was likely rented from the airport. Dean had looked up long enough to notice the time and curse to himself that not only was Stiles home by now, but that he was likely to start calling his cell phone every five minutes if another fifteen passed without an appearance by his only living parent.

The last thing Dean needed today was his ten year old nagging him about healthy work habits.

Finally pulling up in front of the house, Dean stepped from the squad car and glanced at the closed garage door with a faint smile. His baby was settled safely inside, ready for whenever he may need her again, and Roscoe had recently been returned home following a tune-up at the mechanic. Dean was determined to keep Claudia’s Jeep in prime condition for when their son was ready to start driving.

“Who lives here?” Sam asked, brow furrowed in question even as he followed his brother up the front steps to the door.

“I do,” Dean replied, grinning a bit when the younger man managed to trip over his own feet at the pronouncement. “And you’re staying for dinner.” He opened the door and called out, “I’m home!”

From the front door, it was impossible not to see into the living room. Settled on the couch with several textbooks on the table sat Stiles, a pencil held between his teeth while he highlighted something in what appeared to be the science text. Next to him, feet propped on what little of the coffee table that wasn’t part of the homework zone, Gabriel was in a comfortable looking sprawl. Apparently the Trickster had managed to finish up with his side project earlier than anticipated.

Behind him, Dean could hear Sam stumble into the coat rack as he spotted the not-as-dead-as-he’d-thought Archangel. The sound caused both Gabriel and Stiles to look up from what they were doing to stare at the newcomer.

Gabriel’s lips curled into an amused smirk, but it was Dean’s kid - and damn, he loved that little smartass - who spoke up:

“Dad, why is there a badly-shaved Yeti in our foyer?”

The Archangel burst out laughing. Asshole.

A quick glance over his shoulder revealed that, yep, his brother had Bitch Face going, because some things never really changed.

“That, young Skywalker, would be a Samsquatch,” Gabriel managed to reply between fits of continued giggling. As Stiles only proceeded to look more confused and Sam just got bitchier, Dean cleared his throat and shot the Archangel a look that said _we will be talking about this later._

“Stiles,” he said, stepping into the living room and gesturing for Sam to follow, “I’d like you to meet your uncle. Sammy, this is Stiles.” He paused for a moment before adding, “My son.”

“Someone let you procreate with them?”

“I thought you and Uncle Gabe said he was trapped in hell.”

It wasn’t the fact that Sam and Stiles had spoken at the same time that cracked Dean up; it was the fact that they immediately turned and gave near-identical suspicious glares to one another.

Seriously, he loved his kid.

“Well,” Dean said as he shrugged out of his jacket, hanging it on the coat rack before moving to take off his holster, “apparently Sammy managed to claw his way out without any divine intervention. Shut up, Gabe,” he added when it looked like the Trickster wanted _so badly_ to make a smartass remark about Castiel.

Stiles tilted his head as he processed the answer, then gave a short nod and turned his attention back to the wonders of science. “Cool,” he said. “Are we just gonna do take out tonight? No pizza because I saw your last cholesterol test results from the doctor’s office, and we did burgers last night.”

Dean carefully placed his duty weapon in the wall safe - and if he had a few, less than official police weapons shut in there as well, then that was his business because it always paid to be prepared for any eventuality - and shut it firmly before giving his kid a scowl. “What did I say about snooping through my mail, kid?”

“That you were going to start shredding it before I got my hands on it.”

Gabriel began snickering at the answer. Sam bit back a snort behind him, too, and Dean tried not to be even mildly amused at his whole family ganging up on him. Really, he tried.

Heaving a sigh that was not all defeat, the sheriff rubbed at his eyes and said, “Just go get the menus out of the kitchen, Stiles.”

The boy looked up from his book to look briefly at each of the adults before apparently realizing the real reason his dad was trying to send him off for a few minutes’ time. He smiled briefly at his father before pushing himself off and darting into the kitchen. It would really only take him a few seconds at most to get to what Claudia had deemed The Take Out Drawer next to the fridge, but Stiles was savvy enough even at his young age to recognize Dean’s _the adults need to talk_ look that he would not only get the menus but take the time to sort through them while keeping an ear out for his dad to call him back into the room.

The second Stiles cleared the dining room door, Dean turned back around to gesture his little brother into the loving room proper. He himself moved to his armchair and sat, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Sam carefully made his way to the opposite end of the couch from Gabriel, who made no effort to move or to cease giving the younger Winchester an amused look.

“So, Sam,” the Archangel said the instant the man’s ass hit the cushions, “how long have you been back roaming the world?”

Sam glowered at the Trickster for a moment before Dean cleared his throat lightly. “About ten years,” he admitted. “I’m not really sure how long I was in the cage, but when I pulled my way free I went to check on you, Dean,” he added, turning to look at his brother. “You were still with Lisa at that point, so I didn’t want to bother you with this life again.”

Dean snorted. “I was only out of it for maybe two months, tops,” he said when Sam’s brow crinkled in confusion. “Too much still needing to be done, and I promised I’d leave it all behind after a year on the road. Actually, right around the time I got here seemed to be the time to settle down.”

Sam considered that for a moment before nodding. “I have to admit that I haven’t really seen much here yet, but I do understand the appeal. Not too small a town but not the city either. Perfect place to just settle down and live.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “Met a great woman, made some new friends, had a kid who simultaneously makes me feel too damned old and way too young for this shit.” He smiled to himself before shaking his head and adding, “And yet trouble still finds me and mine. The Hales were friends of mine, Sammy. I’m not happy that the Argents are still out there.”

“Trust me,” the younger man said, eyes narrowing in whatever memory he had of Kate Argent flitted through his mind, “I’m no more happy about it than you are. That’s why I’m trying to get to find her before she strikes somewhere else.”

Gabriel sighed and slumped back on the couch, rolling his head back to gaze at the ceiling. “Well, kiddos,” he remarked, “I don’t think it’ll be that easy. If she’s gotten away with it in the past, that means she knows how to cover her tracks. You’ll have to look for other ways to snare this particular rabbit.”

Dean rubbed his eyes wearily and sighed. “The only thing I’m thinking of right now is dinner, and then after my nosy kid goes to bed we can start brainstorming on what might stick to the bitch.”

Proving that he was indeed listening for the okay, Stiles chose that moment to walk back into the living room with a handful of take-out menus. He huffed at his dad but still chose to drop himself on the arm of the man’s chair and hand him the stack.

“I wasn’t sure what to pick between Thai and Chinese,” Stiles said blithely, fooling only Sam with his careful innocence; Dean meanwhile knew that his kid had heard enough to probably start looking up laws and ordinances online the instant he headed to bed later in the evening. And that was fine with the elder Stilinski; it would let the kid feel like he was helping Laura and Derek and Peter somehow despite being too young to really _do_ much of anything.

“I could go for Thai,” Sam offered.

Dean couldn’t help but smile a bit. Maybe his brother could find a way to fit into his new life without too much difficulty after all.


	15. Time Keeps Moving Forward

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> True Fact: I almost titled this chapter "Time Warp," if only because Apollymi and I spent way too much time onYouTube last night watching various Rocky Horror clips.
> 
> That said, this is a time skip chapter, with various alterations from canon mentioned all over.

What little bit of a trail they’d thought they had dried up within the span of two months. A combination of not enough police officers in the other states asking questions and the way that anyone even remotely affiliated with the Argent family tended to deny all knowledge of their activities did nothing more than hinder results. Not even Gabriel, using methods that were probably a little hinky and that Dean resolutely did _not_ want to know about, was able to get answers, and there was little choice but to declare the side investigation into the Hale fire a cold case.

That didn’t mean it was going to be ignored indefinitely however.

Dean kept copies of the files in the safe at the house, making sure that Sam had a copy of his own just in case, and made sure the originals were secured at the station. Those files included records of Kate Argent’s birth certificate, the false records for enrollment at Beacon Hills Community College, Derek Hale’s high school transcripts for the time frame in which Argent had been “dating” the boy, and a few other reports indicating that Argent had probably been involved with teenage boys in previous years. If nothing else, they would be able to book her for statutory rape if she ever reared her head anywhere near Beacon County again.

While the elder brother turned much of his attention back to raising his son and keeping his town as safe as possible, the younger set about finding a space for himself in Beacon Hills. Sam applied for a job as a paralegal at David Whittemore’s firm, and was hired without much trouble at all. It probably helped that he was still taking legal courses online, and the firm had offered to help him pay for law school if he decided he wanted to take that step.

Dean gave it a year or two before Sam took them up on the offer. Samuel Remington, Attorney at Law sounded like a procedural drama to him, and he would fucking _delight_ in introducing his brother to people that way.

And life continued moving steadily forward. Another year passed, with no new insights into the Hale fire and a few sporadic visits from Laura to check up on her uncle. She never stayed in town for more than a night or two, long enough to confirm that there was no change in Peter’s condition or updates on the case before returning to wherever it was she’d squirreled her brother away. Popular rumor was that she’d settled in New York City, but Dean wasn’t so sure about that. The Hales were werewolves, after all, and the noise of a city as big as New York was probably not the best environment for a pack of two to go in order to lick their wounds.

He’d honestly put his money on Aurora if they’d made it as far as New York State, to be honest; chances were probably more likely that they’d gone to ground in Virginia City, Nevada given how quickly Laura’s trips passed.

Stiles’ birthday came and went again, and Dean had to face the fact that in just two short years he’d be living with a teenager. He had weathered the whole fake crush thing with aplomb, but he wasn’t sure what to think when he came home close to midnight one evening to find his eleven year old sacked out on the couch with his supposed friend Erica Reyes sprawled halfway on top of him. The pair were sound asleep, and Dean very politely woke the two of them up and offered the embarrassed blonde girl a ride home. It was only after he’d dropped her off at home that he started teasing Stiles about having girls over late at night.

Stiles very firmly insisted that “it wasn’t like that, Jesus fuck, Dad,” but the blush burning across the kids neck and ears told a different story. And here Dean had been hoping that his kid wouldn’t _really_ notice girls for another ten years yet, silly him.

At least he could be grateful for the fact that Stiles didn’t possess the Winchester genes, or he’d be seriously worried about what his kid was getting up to during school hours with the opposite - or, hell, he was a modern dad and realized that bisexuality was a thing, even with the same sex. After all, Dean had hardly been an innocent virgin at just a few years older than his son; there was a reason he’d worried that he was Ben’s bio-dad until Lisa assured him that he wasn’t.

(There was still the frustration that, despite how many times they’d made love after finally pulling their heads out of the their asses, Dean and Claudia had never been able to get pregnant with a sibling for Stiles. They had had such high hopes of giving their son a little brother or sister, had even picked out names - Liam for a son, Mary for a daughter - before going to the doctor to see if there was anything they could do to increase fertility after months with no signs of a second pregnancy.

Both Claudia and Dean had been tested. And although Claudia’s results were positive, had in fact said she could likely carry another child to term successfully, Dean’s were not as good. The news that he was apparently infertile was news to him, and a discussion after returning home from that unpleasant appointment made them realize that Dean’s stint in hell was probably the culprit.

There was only very brief discussion of in vitro; Claudia nixed the topic with her refusal to choose a donor parent. So they had settled into life as the parents of only one child, and never revisited the subject of more children.)

Another year went by, still no new information to add to the files on the Hale fire, although Kate Argent’s name was heard by one of Bobby’s contacts in Denver. Dean made a note of the woman’s location in his files and requested that any news of mysterious arsons or mysterious deaths in general be passed his way. Sam decided to go forward with taking the California Bar Exam, and Whittemore, Cooper, and Associates was more than happy to help pay his expenses. Stiles and Erica continued to be “just friends” until Erica’s eleventh birthday after which Dean’s kid came home to inform him that he now had a girlfriend.

Gabriel, the dick, thought it was hilarious.

There was no change in Peter Hale’s condition, and gradually Laura Hale stopped coming to town. She would apparently still call to check in on her uncle, but she didn’t set foot in Beacon Hills at all during that time or any of the following years. Dean didn’t like it, didn’t think that it was good for the pack bonds, and worried that Peter would deteriorate without that link to his remaining family.

It was at some point between Laura’s last real trip into town and Stiles’ twelfth birthday that Natalie Martin, Lydia’s mother, finally kicked Jacob out of their house. Dean had seen _that_ split coming for years, the man’s apparent disinterest in being a father figure clashing horribly with the woman’s adoration of her only daughter. No one could say for certain what the final straw had been, but the fact that Jacob had taken a very sudden trip out of town three days before Lydia’s own twelfth birthday and only returned a week later with a suntan didn’t help to alleviate rumors that he was having an affair.

Somehow Sam wound up helping out Natalie’s divorce lawyer, and they hit it off spectacularly. The two became fast friends, spending time together running errands around town. It probably helped a lot that Sam made attempts to include Lydia, who was furious with her father for ruining her birthday and making her mother look like a fool in front of all their neighbors, in their outings whenever possible. He insisted that there was nothing deeper than a friendship forged through time spent together, and Dean was inclined to believe his brother.

He was also inclined to believe that, given enough time, he was going to wake up one day and discover that he was a step-uncle.

It was as another year began to slip away, wherein his hyperactive little spaz of a son evolved into a real life teenager and made Dean wonder if his father had had nearly as much nervous anxiety as he was feeling at the prospect of his kid driving in the next three years, that he discovered where said spaz had been disappearing to some days of the week.

Granted, Beacon Hills was not a huge town at all, and there wasn’t very much that a preteen could get into. Dean was well aware that Stiles spent more than a few days of the week at the movies and the arcade, accompanied either by his friends or as actual dates with Erica, and as the sheriff he had the unfair advantage of the entire town being _more_ than happy to rat out his kid. And the fact remained that Dean trusted his son to not do anything that could cause him any real bodily harm.

It helped a lot that Stiles had a literal wings-and-feathers-and-righteous-fury angel to look out for him as well.

None of that left him prepared for his thirteen year old to wander into his office one afternoon, sit in the chair on the other side of Dean’s desk, and solemnly make an announcement that would have the sheriff keeping a close eye on developing events for the next three years:

“I think the new nurse in the long term ward is up to something. She’s way too interested in Uncle Peter.”


	16. Pack

It was definitely a gross misuse of department resources, but Dean didn’t even hesitate for a fraction of a second to begin doing a background check on one Jennifer Dorian, RNP.

What he found on her didn’t raise a single red flag: she had attended the University of California, Irvine for both her undergrad and nurse practitioner program, she had started her career at the UC Irvine Medical Center before transferring north to Mercer for five years until she opted to move to Beacon Hills at which point she transferred to Beacon Hills Memorial. Her school records were exemplary, and in the two previous hospitals where she’d worked there was nothing but commendations and praise on her records.

Given Stiles’ unease about the situation, Dean had expected to find a mysterious death or two of a patient under Nurse Dorian’s care, but there wasn’t even so much as a patient complaining that their water tasted funny. For all intents and purposes, BHM had snatched up a great asset for the hospital.

Still, Dean may pick and tease that he hadn’t believed a word his kid said since he started talking, but he did trust that Stiles had a firm grasp of reality and shockingly accurate instincts. But without any proof, there was no way in hell he could convince the hospital to fire a woman they’d just hired two months’ prior.

That being the case, he did the only thing that wouldn’t look weird or suspicious: Dean started to spend more time visiting Peter’s room in the hospital, both with his kid and without… and talked his brother into visiting as well.

Sam initially balked at the idea, because in his own words, “I don’t have any kind of history with these people, Dean. Won’t it be odd that the Sheriff’s long-lost brother is suddenly popping in to visit one of the descendants of the town’s founders?”

“Well,” Dean had drawled, “that’s why you’ll be either meeting me there to discuss some family issues or accompanying my kid to make sure he’s not bothering the hospital staff as they’re trying to do their jobs.”

There was a lot more back and forth, but eventually the younger ex-Winchester caved. Six months later, they brought Natalie — and Dean fucking _called it,_ he was going to have a sister- and niece-in-law by Christmas — into the fold. And not only about Stiles’ concerns over Nurse Dorian; Dean figured that if the former Mrs. Martin was going to be part of the family, she should go into the marriage better prepared for the crazy that followed even retired Hunters.

Natalie had been silent for a full minute before heaving a sigh, rubbing at her eyes, and blurting out, “Would this be a bad time to mention that my former mother-in-law, God rest her soul, was committed for hearing voices and claiming to be a banshee? And that she was insistent that Lydia’s one, too?”

So, yeah. Fucking _banshees._ All that was missing was for some long lost, utterly distant relative of Claudia’s to crawl out of the woodwork and announce that witches ran in the family bloodline.

(Although according to Alan Deaton, Beacon Hills’ only veterinarian and the local goddamned Druid, witches weren’t real. Which, of course, was bullshit because Dean had hunted them before. Anything Deaton said was to be taken with a metric ton of salt until confirmed or denounced by a phone call to Bobby.)

The combined forces of the Stilinski-Remington-Martin cohort was enough to raise some eyebrows — especially when Stiles and Lydia would start snipping at each other over some thing or another, because both were too smart for their own good — and seemed to settle the unease caused by Nurse Dorian. Who was, indeed, creepy as fuck and set most of Dean’s nerves on edge, but still didn’t have that weird “angel of mercy” vibe.

And on the subject of angels, Sam had _finally_ caught onto the fact that Stiles and Dean didn’t share a single drop of blood in their veins.

Sometime in late October, Bobby had phoned to tell the brothers that Castiel had dropped a warning about a rogue band of the heavenly host attempting to overthrow the current regime. The old hunter had taken that to mean that some halfwit of an angel might try to pick himself up a shiny Winchester meatsuit to wear around the planet, and Sam had promptly freaked the fuck out.

He knew for sure that he was hidden, given the Enochian carved into his ribcage, and he wasn’t concerned overly much about Dean. What he was worried about was that Stiles — being both young and an innocent without protection that he knew of — would prove to be a tempting option.

Dean argued until he was likely literally blue in the face that there was nothing to worry about, but Sam was on a roll and refused to let his brother get a word in edgewise. During all of this, Lydia was staring at the pair of them from the couch with wide hazel eyes while Stiles was looking less amused by the minute. Finally, the teenager huffed a sigh and flung himself to his feet to stalk from the room, returning a few minutes later with a couple of folders from the downstairs office.

_“Here,” Stiles said, slapping the folders into his uncle’s hands before dropping down next to his almost-cousin on the couch. Lydia shot him a look even as Sam frowned down at the items he now held._

_“What am I looking at here?” he asked; Dean, recognizing the items, merely smirked._

_The boy fixed Sam with a steady gaze. “The red folder has the receipts from when Dad first arrived in Beacon Hills. There’s the hotel, several from the diner, one from the garage where he got the Impala tuned up, and a few others. Check the dates on ‘em.”_

_Sam flipped open the folder and leafed through a few of the pages within. “They’re all from January ‘95, different days for most of them.”_

_“The blue one has my birth certificate, along with a few other things from the hospital in the week I was born,” Stiles added. “Note the dates on them.”_

_The blue folder was flipped open, and the Confused Sam Face made a triumphant return. “April 8, 1995. I don’t… what?”_

_Lydia started to giggle, putting a hand over her mouth to try and muffle her amusement._

_“Which means,” Stiles offered with a shrug, “that not only can I honestly say that I am not nor have I ever been a Winchester, but also that Uncle Gabriel is a sadist and I am still never forgiving him for the tattoo no matter how badass it’ll make me look in college.”_

That was also how Sam found out about Dean’s preemptive protective measures to keep his kid safe, and how they all learned that Lydia was more of a spitfire than his kid gave her credit for. Natalie was still a little pissed about the anti-possession ward that now lived on her daughter’s right hip.

When all was said and done, however, Nurse Dorian presented as a competent woman who was a little hinky but damned good at her job. That didn’t stop the teenagers from continued visits to Peter’s room, nor did those visits do little more than feed the frustration that Stiles and now Lydia felt towards the other surviving Hales.

Honestly, sometimes the all too human kids (even _if_ there could be fae hiding in Lydia’s blood) acted more like pack animals than the actual wolves did.

Another year passed by with no untoward actions committed by Nurse Dorian.

Yet something changed.

Peter, although still very much catatonic, began to react to Dean’s family when they were around.

Nothing major, of course, because that would be too good to be true — real, solid signs of recovery after five long years. No, simple things:

A slow blink as Dean and Sam legitimately discussed a case involving a man and his trophy wife having sex in a Macy’s dressing room.

A slight turning of his head towards Lydia and Stiles where they sat and argued over the answer to one of the questions on their math homework.

A very soft, barely there hum in response to questions that could be interpreted as questions to him rather than someone else in the room.

It was very little, to be honest, but still definitive progress. With any hope, maybe another two or three years, Peter could reach a level of recovery where he’d be able to _actually_ interact with others.

For now, all Dean could do was hope for more positive reactions from the beta and keep adding to his growing file on Kate Argent. Maybe he could get that bitch arrested just in time for Peter to be able to appreciate the knowledge that the woman who’d killed his pack would be spending a good chunk of her remaining years in a prison cell.

It was only a little bit of hope, but it was hope all the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed that there's an actual count now for the chapters. I'm thinking that there's probably one full chapter left with an epilogue to lead into the prologue to And Only the Moon Howls. Sorry for the brief skipping around between the two stories, the first two scenes for the second part of the series just... smacked me and wanted written immediately.


	17. Revelation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I'm evil.

Truth be told, Dean was probably the very last to realize when he fell for his second Jess.

To be fair, he could be forgiven for it. After all, the past few years had been very busy. It wasn’t easy to covertly investigate a Hunter who was by her dossier shaping up to be a complete and utter psychopath, raise an overly curious son who was going to be driving in just one short year (and holy _fuck_ , where had the time gone? Wasn’t Stiles just learning to walk only yesterday?), and come to terms with the fact that his little brother was a permanent fixture in his life again. Given all of that, it was only too easy to miss what was right in front of his face the entire time.

Or on his sofa, eating the junk food he tried to keep hidden from his kid. Or calling while out of town on a “visit” to someone in need of creative smiting just because he wanted to chat.

The fact hit Dean rather abruptly one afternoon, on a normal Tuesday afternoon sometime just after Stiles’ fifteenth birthday. He’d been talking to Gabriel on the phone, rolling his eyes fondly at the archangel’s insistence that it was _so appropriate_ to make a jock cry by making him think he was being dumped by his girlfriend for another woman, while his kid and niece sat at the kitchen table working on something for English. It was all too normal an occurrence, and it wasn’t until the end of the conversation that Dean realized anything.

“Just don’t get yourself arrested or something,” he’d finished up. “I don’t have jurisdiction in Vegas, Gabe.”

 _“Yeah, yeah, spoilsport,”_ came the reply. _“With any luck I’ll only be a few more days, then I can be back before the weekend starts. Talk to you soon.”_

“Be careful, we miss you,” Dean said before offering a goodbye and hanging up. Less than a second later, he realized that he’d ended many a conversation with Claudia the same way and blurted out, “Oh my God, I think I might be in love with Gabriel.”

The response from the kids was also a bit surprising.

“Wow, Dad,” Stiles drawled sarcastically without looking up from his books, “thanks for the breaking news that I figured out when I was six years old. Really.”

Lydia, for her part, blew her bangs out of her eyes and fixed Dean with a serious look. “How were you unaware of the mutual heart eyes and the pining when he’s away?” she asked dryly. “Is this just something your family does, be totally out of touch with their feelings? Because, really, it was sort of cute when Dad was figuring out he liked Mom, but this is really just...”

“Pathetic?”

The strawberry blonde nodded at Stiles’ contribution and continued to look at Dean, waiting for an answer.

“What?” Dean asked. “No, it’s not like — well, it’s not as if... aw, crap, have I _really_ been acting like that for years?”

“Yes,” both teens answered immediately, with Stiles adding, “It was always kinda that way when Mom was still alive, too. Only back then it was all three of you being ridiculous. I asked Mom once and she just laughed like people do when they don’t want to think about something and sent me to go play outside with Scott.”

Dean had the sudden and very strong urge to beat his head against the door jamb, but refrained only to keep the kids from being even more obnoxious. He compensated by leaving the room to go have a nice, quiet panic attack in his home office before sending Lydia back home and Stiles off to his room an hour later.

By the time Gabriel rolled back into town three days later, _every single goddamn person_ in his family had chimed in on the situation. The only one who had any measure of sympathy for him was Natalie, and Dean was almost positive she was only being polite; the woman had nodded and hummed in the right places during his freak out, but he could hear her choke back a snicker when she excused herself to get some more coffee.

“Evening, Stilinskis,” the archangel greeted as he popped into the living room and dropped onto the couch, feet immediately going up on the coffee table. “What’d I miss while I was on my business trip?”

It was the way he’d always announced his return, showing up out of nowhere and making himself immediately comfortable. It had been annoying the first couple of times — and yes, Claudia _had_ repeated the whole throwing the remote at Gabriel’s head thing twice more — but the family had become used to it in fairly short order. Dean took a moment to reflect that the arrivals had become greeted over the years before his wife’s death with fond exasperation and admonitions to _wipe your damned feet before putting them on my furniture for fuck’s sake_ from the woman and snorts of amusement from the sheriff himself.

Stiles, on the other hand, didn’t need to become used to the abrupt arrivals because his earliest memories included the trickster just showing up out of nowhere. As a result, he was usually the first to return the greeting; unfortunately for Dean, the trend continued.

“Hey, Uncle Gabe,” the teenager replied without looking up from whatever obscure text he was reading today. “Nothing much, just Dad finally cluing on the fact that I’ve got two dads and a mom.”

Dean groaned and nearly introduced his head to the wall, but the ringing silence from the normally loud angel made him look over. Gabriel was just staring at Stiles like the kid had grown a second head, looking an odd mixture of confused, angry, hopeful and hopeless all at once.

The sheriff cleared his throat, drawing all attention — even his kid’s — to him. “Stiles,” he said evenly, “aren’t you running late for visiting hours?”

Stiles’ brow furrowed in confusion. “I wasn’t going to head out to see Peter until—”

He cut himself off as he finally noted the expression on his uncle’s face before abruptly resuming with, “—after Uncle Gabe arrived, and what do you know!” The kid slammed his book closed, making both adult and angel jump before standing quickly. “In fact, why don’t I just go on and head that way? I’ll call before I head home, maybe I’ll drop by to see Uncle Sammy and Aunt Natalie. Bye!”

And with that Hurricane Stiles exited the house, leaving Dean and Gabriel in a sudden, uncomfortable silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And on that cliffhanger, a couple of things to note:
> 
> When I started this whole thing off, I went in with the firm thought that I wanted three things to happen. First of all, I wanted to write my own take on the Supernatural/Teen Wolf crossover deal, with Dean and Sheriff Stilinski being the same person and the events of Teen Wolf shifting to compensate for that truth.
> 
> The second thing I wanted to do was fix-it fic with bringing Gabriel back to life and work him into the narrative. I like to think I've managed that with some marginal success.
> 
> The third thing, which I realized I only _thought_ I'd managed but realized that I didn't, was to hook up Dean and Gabriel, even with Claudia in the picture.
> 
> I realized this had happened only when I started work on "And Only the Moon Howls," and I'm pretty sure the words _oh fuck, did I really just skip something major I'd intended to happen?_ came out of my mouth during a conversation with Apollymi. I shelved basically the entire thing while trying to figure out if I should do a total rewrite, write a ton of time-stamp fics to cover the background that should have been there, or just have Dean realize it before the events of Moon begin.
> 
> I've opted to do a combination of discovery nearing the start of TW/Moon and some time stamps with Claudia as I've alluded to in this chapter via Deus Stiles Machina.
> 
> Comment if you think I'm a loon, please.


	18. An Overdue Talk

The heavy silence seemed to last for ages, although truth be told, it was only a few minutes before Gabriel cleared his throat and managed to school his expression into something resembling his usual, snarky resting face. It didn’t fool Dean for a moment, not now that he was actually looking.

“So,” the archangel drawled, “seems like the kiddo has picked up some odd ideas, huh?”

Dean fixed him with a steady look. It was the one that Stiles had taken to calling the _I am the sheriff, do not think you can fuck me over_ look, and he generally found himself breaking it out when he got the feeling that someone was trying to lie to him or change the subject.

Honestly, it was probably a testament to how blind he’d been to his own feelings that he hadn’t used it on Gabriel before now.

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Dean replied evenly. “I think my kid,” he just barely caught himself before it came out as _our kid,_ “is more observant than he lets on most of the time. He did point out to me that I’ve been missing something right in front of me for years now.” He paused and added, “Even withheld most of the sarcasm he could have used, too. I’m almost proud of the brat.”

Gabriel maintained the facade of ignorance for another ten to twenty seconds before visibly deflating. “Am I that obvious?” he finally asked.

The human snorted. “Nope,” he said, “but apparently _I’m_ that oblivious. And obvious to a kid who didn’t ever think it odd that his mom and dad had a friend who literally pops up out of nowhere on occasion and just presumed that’s how his family worked.”

The trickster actually chuckled briefly at that before slouching further on the couch. Dean figured it couldn’t really do any harm at this point to join him, and moved across the room to do just that. It was something they’d done probably a hundred times, both while Claudia was still alive to slump down in between them and after she’d passed, but somehow _now_ it was more... intimate, really. It had probably always been that way, at least to the eyes of a six year old boy who had just thought _okay_ and never really questioned it.

Dean took a brief moment to lament that he, that Gabriel, that Claudia, that none of them had ever realized what they all were to one another before it was too late for one of them.

“Where does that leave us now?” the trickster asked once the silence of the house had apparently become too much for him to deal with. “I mean, it’s not like I’ve been absent around this town or your life. But won’t people think it’s odd that suddenly things are different between us?”

The sheriff frowned for a moment, tilting his head back to gaze at the ceiling. He let his thoughts drift to some of the conversations he’d had with locals in the past few years and found himself wanting to smack something. Probably his own head off the wall.

“Well,” he told the ceiling, “if the barista at the cafe and the clerks at the whole foods market are to be believed, most people are just gonna be happy that we’ve ‘gone public.’”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Dean rolled his head to the side and shot Gabriel an amused, sheepish grin. “The last time I went to get coffee during shift Barbara was asking after my ‘young man.’ I just assumed she meant Stiles, but again, I seem to be the last person to board the ‘Debriel’ ship.”

The archangel actually slow-blinked before a smirk stretched across his lips. “So what you’re telling me is that this town _ships_ us?” he asked.

“Apparently,” the other man offered with a shrug. “Although they probably think that you, me, _and_ Claudia were a threesome for years. How the hell did I miss this?” he mused, turning his eyes towards the ceiling again. “I’m the goddamn _sheriff.”_

“You’re also a single dad with a lot on his plate,” Gabriel offered, sliding over and slouching into Dean.

Dean snorted at that. “Eh, not so much a single dad,” he remarked. “After all, _you’ve_ had a hand in raising the kid. I think he gets the sarcasm from you.”

“Oh, bullshit!” Gabriel grabbed one of the throw pillows and smacked the other man with it. “If anything, he got that from you.”

Dean snatched the pillow before he could be hit again. “He didn’t get it from me,” he protested with a smirk. “That’s all you, smart guy.”

They held the stalemate for another ten seconds before snorting and saying, “Claudia,” in unison. Although if Dean was honest, he probably _had_ influenced Stiles on that front. Just a little. A tiny bit. Really.

It was still more Gabriel’s fault.

Said archangel dropped his grip on the pillow and dropped back into his seat again, tilting his head back to gaze at the ceiling. After a moment, he reached out with one hand and twined his fingers slowly with Dean’s.

Dean didn’t pull his hand away, he just tightened the hold and let out a small sigh.

It was a small step, but still a step forward. He could handle slow. After all, he’d apparently been falling for fifteen years; a few more wouldn’t kill him.

And goddammit, Sheila and Tara probably had a betting pool at the office on when Dean and Gabriel would get their shit together. The winner had _better_ plan on buying him a pie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here it is, my lovelies: the penultimate chapter of Welcome to Beacon Hills. All that remains is the epilogue, and that is the end for this part of the tale.
> 
> ...which just means that updates will begin on And Only the Moon Howls shortly.
> 
> Thank you for reading, I hope you've all enjoyed this rollercoaster with me.


	19. An Epilogue, and a Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hare y'all go, have some Gabriel to finish this bad boy up.

His cell phone rang, belting out the chorus to “I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)” as he made his way down the street. It was very early in the morning, somewhere just past two o’clock, and he had finished up with his *ahem* client for the day.

Given that he’d been looking forward to calling his partner (and that still made him grin like an idiot some days, they had wasted so much damned time on all the doubts and insecurities) once it was morning in California, he was both happy and concerned to be receiving a call from the man.

“Hey, sexy,” he said instead of asking what he really wanted, which was something along the lines of _what happened, are you okay, is Stiles okay, who do I have to kill?_

_“Hi, Gabe,”_ came Dean’s reply, something in his tone just slightly off. That coupled with the unexpected phone call was enough to put the archangel on edge. _“How’s it going with your project?”_

“I think I’ve just about made my point,” he answered. “I could probably be finished up sometime tonight and be home in time for breakfast with my favorite boys tomorrow morning.”

Dean’s next words made him stop walking abruptly:

_“If you could get back sooner rather than later, I’d appreciate it. We got a werewolf problem.”_

Gabriel gave the most cursory of glances around to make sure no one was watching before he teleported to the hotel room he’d rented for his working vacation. The instant he was out of the public eye, he hissed down the phone line, “What do you mean, _a werewolf problem?”_

Dean started to reply, but in the background the trickster could hear Stiles talking to someone in soothing tones, along with Lydia bitching about wrinkles in her blouse and what sounded like a dog huffing at the commentary. Without giving it a second thought, Gabriel snapped his fingers to take himself back to the Stilinski home... 

...and had to take several steps backward as what could only be a giant, rust-colored werewolf lunged at him with a snarl.

Dean swore and dropped the phone, Sam lifted what seemed to be a rolled up newspaper in preparation to smack the wolf as if it -- he -- were a misbehaving pet, and both teenagers jumped up to grab the beast. The wolf itself actually paused, tilted its head quizzically, and deliberately sniffed at Gabriel. After a tense second or two, it sneezed, rolled its very blue eyes, and turned around to herd Stiles and Lydia back onto the couch before flopping across the pair of them.

The archangel took a moment to observe the wolf -- which flashed red eyes at him before dismissing him as no threat -- the situation the kids were in, and how both former Winchesters relaxed at the lack of a fight before turning to Dean and quirking an eyebrow.

“So,” he drawled, “Peter’s obviously awake, but what else do we know?”

Stiles answered, and Gabriel swore under his breath:

“Something happened to Laura. And the new girl’s family might be involved. Her name’s Allison Argent.”

_**The End... To Be Concluded in And Only the Moon Howls** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And aren't you folks so very fucking happy that I've already got the prologue and first chapter of the sequel up already?
> 
> If you were somehow unaware of it, click the little link to take you to the next part of the series and bask in my epic weirdness. If you were aware of it, go ahead and reacquaint yourself with the next part of this universe.
> 
> And yep, this does mean that Gabe will be playing a role in the series. He can't just let his psuedo kid deal with this shit on his own, right?


End file.
